Neil Brown, vice president of the Tampa Bay Times since 2009, and its editor for 16 years, has been named chairman of the Poynter Institute\u2019s Board of Trustees. He has been president of Poynter \u2013 a teaching, fact-checking and publishing nonprofit that works with journalists in more than a dozen countries \u00a0\u2013 since 2017.<\/p>\n
The Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay Times.<\/p>\n
Brown succeeds former Times CEO Paul Tash, who is retiring after serving 20 years as Poynter\u2019s board chair.<\/p>\n
A native of Chicago, Brown began his journalism career at the Miami Herald, covering government and politics. In 1988 he was hired as managing editor at Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C., a publication founded by Nelson Poynter, the Times\u2019 longtime owner and publisher, and namesake of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies (its original name).<\/p>\n
Brown joined the then-St. Petersburg Times in 1993, as world editor in charge of national and international news. He was made the news organization\u2019s editor in 2010, and was succeeded in that role by Mark Katchess in late 2025.<\/p>\n
He inherits the mantle of Board Chair during a time of great upheaval and uncertainty in the news business.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think one of the great challenges journalism always has, but can rise up to, is imagination,\u201d Brown told the Catalyst. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to have some imagination for being adaptive, and recognizing that audiences\u2019 interest, tastes and needs are forever changing.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that means we\u2019ve got to be more nimble, and a little bit more creative. What I sometimes say is: We\u2019ve got to be guided by our fundamentals, but not shackled by them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Old-school \u201cconventions that worked once, but don\u2019t work as well any more\u201d must be left in the past, he insisted. \u201cAnd rather than cling to those things, see if we can partner with our audiences a little bit more so that we can stay relevant to them when their own circumstances and interests change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Neil Brown, vice president of the Tampa Bay Times since 2009, and its editor for 16 years, has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-184833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}