Jesse Brown (journalist)

Early life

Born to a Canadian Jewish family and raised in Toronto, Brown attended Northern Secondary School. He got his first experience with the media at the age of sixteen, interning at local radio station Q107's promotions department through his high school's co-op program.

At seventeen, inspired by punk zines and "too many" viewings of Pump Up the Volume, Brown started Punch, an underground student newspaper that raised a commotion by running a piece evaluating the school's teachers based on a survey of hundred students Brown interviewed. He ended up getting disciplined by the school's principal while the entire episode raised enough controversy to be featured on Metro Morning, a CBLA-FM radio programme then-hosted by Andy Barrie, where young Brown got invited to give his side of the story. Based on the publicity it received via the controversy, the paper expanded to become a Toronto-wide underground project that ran for a few years.

During mid-to-late 1990s, Brown moved to Montreal in order to attend McGill University. Outside of classes, he freelanced for various outlets including Vice, a magazine that recently transformed from a government-funded Voice of Montreal community multicultural media project. He also engaged in elaborate pranks on local mainstream media organizations such as putting out a press-release from a fictitious dot-com company babytalk.com about a fictitious product, Babytalk, that "empowers Canadian infants to communicate with Japanese, Australian, and German tots" and helps them "make friends all over the world and learn valuable job skills sure to aid them in the new-economy job market". CFCF, CTV's affiliate in Montreal, shot a piece on the fake product by the non-existent company featuring a woman with her 2-year-old baby (both arranged for by Brown) that aired on the station's 6 p.m. daily newscast.

Journalism career

Between 2003 and 2004, Brown wrote a humour column in the Saturday Night magazine in Toronto. Simultaneously, he continued setting up pranks that served as fodder for the column. In 2003, using a pseudonym Stuart Neihardt, Brown staged a media hoax that several Canadian publications fell for and reported on as news by publicizing the launch of Stu, a "regular guy magazine for the adequate man" envisioned as an antidote to then popular lad magazines such as FHM and Maxim.

CBC Radio

Brown joined CBC Radio in 2004 as a chase producer, gathering stories, booking guests, and preparing material for various programs. He got hired to the network by Michael Enright who felt the young man's humour and irreverence would be a welcome addition to CBC Radio's creative process.

In summer 2006, Brown started hosting The Contrarians, a 30-minute weekly show on CBC Radio One devoted to discussion of unpopular ideas in the Canadian context "that just might be right". It consisted of Brown championing a controversial argument each episode to see if it had merit. The topics covered included a thesis that "multiculturalism doesn't work, we just eat each other's sandwiches", a claim that feminism had basically achieved all its goals, a rejection of the widely held view that Canada is a 'good guy' on the global scene, etc. It aired Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. with a repeat the following day at 7:30 p.m. The show ended once the new season began in the fall. According to Brown, the CBC brass didn't cancel the show due to being unhappy with its content, but because of catching wind of how difficult its production process was. Brown described his experience on the show as "very difficult" because the management wanted the show to be edgy and really push buttons while the different producers he was being paired with were uncomfortable with the subject matter because it often contradicted their personal convictions. He talked of the show's executive producer Lynda Shorten who simultaneously ran The Sunday Edition facing a near mutiny from her colleagues over the feminism episode and the relationship between the two souring as a result as he no longer enjoyed her support within the building.

Almost a decade later, in mid-January 2015, as his crowdfunded media criticism website Canadaland began getting a higher profile in the wake of its Jian Ghomeshi and Amanda Lang bombshells, an occurrence from Brown's own professional past on The Contrarians was scrutinized by The Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt. In his piece on the emerging crowdfunded podcaster, Houpt characterizes Brown as having "a track record of playing fast and loose with facts", in support offering a claim that Brown "faked a scene for The Contrarians' pilot" and that the show's producers "hit the roof" upon discovering what had happened. Once the Globe piece was published, Brown took to Twitter to protest Houpt's description and characterization of the event. Brown released their unedited e-mail interview from the day before, where Brown describes having a friend re-record a line from a remote segment in which audio had been badly recorded when originally uttered by a local Little Italy butcher; the email goes on to recount that Brown himself informed the show's executive producer Lynda Shorten of the post-recorded audio, that the episode never aired, and that it was later entirely re-recorded because of the issue— none of which was mentioned in Houpt's Globe piece.

Search Engine

Together with Geoff Siskind and Andrew Parker, Brown created Search Engine, a weekly 30-minute radio program that started airing on CBC Radio One in September 2007. Hosted by Brown and airing Thursdays at 11:30 a.m., the show explored the effects of the Internet on politics and culture while fostering a bit of a collaborative community through its online blog.

CBC cancelled Search Engine in June 2008 as a separate program on its radio schedule, leading to the show's reformatting into a podcast distributed by the CBC while Brown additionally started contributing tech-related material as a feature supplement to other CBC Radio shows such as Metro Morning, The Point, and The Sunday Edition. By spring 2009, in the wake of the corporation's budget cuts, CBC Radio fully terminated its association with Search Engine.

The podcast continued, however, from May 2009, now distributed online by TVOntario, a broadcast network owned by the Government of Ontario. After 177 podcasts on TVO.org, Search Engine ended in July 2012.

Macleans.ca and Toronto Life

In February 2011, Brown began a tech blog on the Maclean's web site. Focusing on the influence of technology on politics and culture rather than merely on presenting the latest gadgets, he documented and opined on issues around WikiLeaks, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), CSEC unwarranted spying of Canadians, cyber-bullying, etc.

Throughout 2011 and 2012, Julian Assange has been a repeated target of Brown's condemnation and personal attacks. Calling Assange a "douchey ideologue", a "greedy, paranoid fame-whore", a "Chomsky-quoting grad school student you avoid talking to at parties", and an "epic donkey lusting for celebrity" while mockingly referencing his physical appearance and personal hygiene, Brown harshly criticized the WikiLeaks founder over the manner in which his organization gathers and distributes information and the way he presents himself in public. Specific things Brown took issue with include what he saw to be Assange's tendency to blame the U.S. and the Jews, his "cozy relations with despots like Alexander Lukashenko", his 2012 "trumped up schlock of a TV show on a Kremlin-backed TV propaganda unit" whose first episode saw him interview Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and "accept Nasrallah's answers about the future of Middle East without bringing up that Hezbollah’s charter calls explicitly for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic State", his decision to put up a paywall on the WikiLeaks website, etc. By April 2013, Brown seemingly started coming around on Assange, praising him and WikiLeaks for republishing the Kissinger cables and creating the Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy (PlusD).

The blog ended in November 2013. In his last post, Brown expressed regret over his writing about Assange, saying "I was half-right, but all wrong" and expanding: "Assange is as I described him, but who cares? Wikileaks has continued to do important work, releasing the Kissinger cables and aiding with the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. By taking aim at Assange, I was guilty of the very thing I was accusing him of: distracting the public from what’s important".

None of Brown's online writings in his two and a half years at Maclean's made the then weekly magazine's print issue. Summarizing his 2011-2013 Maclean's experience during a discussion on an October 2016 Canadaland podcast, Brown said: "They had an in-house distinction — a caste system if you will — with magazine writers on one hand getting paid a certain wage and web bloggers on the other getting a contract wage that's a quarter of that. The web for them was always the ugly stepchild product — an afterthought — because you can't not have a website so they just got some kids to write some stuff. It was frustrating only contributing to the online product because sometimes I'd look at the traffic, which at that time the contributors could still actually look at, and I saw that some of the web-only content was doing better online than the stuff that had first appeared in the magazine ... and this always fell upon deaf ears".

Brown simultaneously reported for the Toronto Life monthly magazine on digital tech topics from late 2011 until mid 2013.

Keenly interested in media criticism, Brown has frequently been expressing dismay at how little of it there is in Canada, pointing to the fact there are no Canadian equivalents of On the Media, Gawker, The Media Show, Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, Media Watch, Listening Post, etc. Condemning the Canadian media as "more of a club than an industry" he feels its lack of self-analysis to be the direct consequence of it being far too insular, rife with inbreeding, and heavily concentrated in Toronto, leading to a reluctance on the part of Canadian reporters to publicly criticize their colleagues.

Canadaland

Having had four of his pitches based around substantive critique of journalism in Canada rejected by different Canadian mainstream news organizations, Brown launched his own media criticism podcast and blog called Canadaland in October 2013. Posted on a weekly basis, it got off the ground thanks to sponsorship from FreshBooks, an accounting software service based in Toronto. Conceding that the podcast turned into "quick poison" for his career, stating his "fairly lucrative" freelance work and talking head engagements dried up instantly, while also facing the fact fellow journalists didn't want to come on as guests due to fear of reprisals, Brown decided to expand Canadaland's scope to include comedy writers and filmmakers.

The guest situation reportedly somewhat improved in February 2014 after Canadaland broke its first big story — news that The National anchor Peter Mansbridge had been paid $28,000 to speak at a December 2012 Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) event, thus raising conflict of interest concerns due to accepting money from an entity with a vested interest in the oil sands issue, a topic Mansbridge regularly reports on from a national platform. The story got picked up on by The Huffington Post, Vice, and reporter Andrew Mitrovica, forcing Mansbridge to address the issue, sparking a lively debate in the Canadian mainstream media outlets. CBC Ombudsman Esther Enkin investigated the issue, concluding there's no problem with Mansbridge taking money to speak before an oil lobby group, though adding that CBC should "think about the appearance of getting paid by interest groups who are likely to feature prominently in the news". In April 2014 CBC announced changes in its rules regarding speaking engagements for its journalists.

In May 2014, the Freshbooks sponsorship expired and didn't get renewed, forcing Brown into finding a new sponsor, Audible.com, which pulled out by September and got replaced with Squarespace. However, facing a situation where existing ad revenue couldn't cover the costs anymore, Brown sought additional ad sources. In early October 2014, having just been rejected for a sponsorship by Wiser's whisky, he announced a crowdfunding initiative through Patreon, seeking funds in order to keep Canadaland afloat, admitting that everything about it works except the financing while also revealing that the podcast attracts some 10,000 listeners every week.

Jian Ghomeshi

Brown received his biggest exposure in late October 2014, teaming up with the Toronto Star investigative reporter Kevin Donovan to report after months of investigation on allegations of non-consensual violence committed by the CBC radio and television host Jian Ghomeshi against various women.

While an investigation by Brown had been on since March 2014, the story began breaking on Friday afternoon, 24 October 2014. In a tweet just before 4 p.m. EST, citing a "highly credible source within the CBC", Brown was the first to report on Jian Ghomeshi's "indefinite leave" from the Canadian public broadcaster. Though the CBC immediately denied this via a tweet from its head of public affairs Chuck Thompson, Brown continued tweeting about there being "much more to this than I can report at this moment" before further indicating that the situation is unrelated to the recent passing of Ghomeshi's father as many had already assumed. By 5:30 PM EST, the CBC confirmed the news of Ghomeshi's "undetermined leave for personal issues" to The Canadian Press news agency with even Ghomeshi himself tweeting within thirty minutes about "taking some much needed personal time".

Two days later, Sunday, 26 October, around noon, CBC put out a surprise short statement about being "saddened to announce its relationship with Jian Ghomeshi has come to an end".

After 5 p.m. EST, Ghomeshi posted a long statement on his Facebook account, informing the public he's been fired from the CBC "because of the risk of my private sex life being made public as a result of a campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend and a freelance writer". Revealing his interest in a variety of mutually agreed upon and consensual activities in the bedroom, the well-known radio host further described the 'jilted ex' as a woman in her late 20s he started casually seeing two years ago and has engaged in forms of consensual BDSM with before eventually ending their on-and-off relationship at the beginning of 2014. Ghomeshi also talked of a "campaign of harassment, vengeance and demonization" against him that he claims began in spring 2014 when a woman begun anonymously reaching out to other women he had dated to tell them she had been a victim of abusive relations with him. Though not mentioning Brown by name, Ghomeshi's statement refers to the journalist as a "freelance writer who was known not to be a fan of mine", further claiming someone has been "colluding with him to find corroborators to build a case to defame me".

Responding to media inquires later in the day, CBC head of public affairs Chuck Thompson said "information came to (CBC’s) attention recently that in CBC’s judgment precludes us from continuing our relationship with Jian Ghomeshi" while Ghomeshi's legal representatives Dentons Canada LLP announced intention to file a suit against the CBC for breach of confidence and bad faith as soon as courts open on Monday morning, seeking $50 million in general and punitive damages.

That Sunday evening, the Star web site ran Brown's and Donovan's report on three anonymous women claiming Ghomeshi subjected them to non-consensual violence while a fourth woman, a CBC co-worker, alleged workplace sexual harassment. It was accompanied by the Toronto Star editor-in-chief Michael Cooke's note titled "Why the Star chose to publish Jian Ghomeshi allegations". The report made the paper's front page below the fold the following day under the headline "CBC fires Ghomeshi over sex allegations" as Ghomeshi filed a CAD$55-million lawsuit that afternoon, suing his former employer CBC for "defamation, breach of confidence and punitive damages". The story immediately became major news across Canada; various aspects began to be dissected and commented on extensively in the country's media. Over the next few days, as more anonymous women came forward with accusations of violence against Ghomeshi, another report from Brown and Donovan got posted online by the Star on Wednesday night, 29 October — featuring the very first alleged victim who decided to reveal her identity, Canadian actress Lucy DeCoutere. Next morning, the report made the Star's front page above the fold under the headline "Jian Ghomeshi slapped, choked me, actress says".

Canadaland Expansion

Following the Ghomeshi story Canadaland continued to grow in popularity, gaining crowdfunded financial support through Patreon. Brown expanded adding new Podacasts, Canadaland Commons, focused on Canadian politics and The Imposter focused on Canada's art scene.

Business career

In parallel with journalism, Brown established an IT startup. In 2007, together with a high school friend, cartoonist Jacob Blackstock, he co-founded Bitstrips, a company that developed Bitmoji web app allowing users to create animated avatars of themselves. By late 2012, the application expanded to Facebook and additionally to mobile platforms during fall 2013.

Brown continued as the Bitstrips' co-owner and in November 2013 the company attracted a $3 million investment from Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Sir Li Ka-shing. In October 2014, the company announced new $8 million funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. With becoming available on iOS and Android, the application found immediate success in the Apple App Store, reportedly ranking consistently in the top 10 utility apps. It gained further publicity throughout 2015 after managing to get celebrities such as Seth Rogen, John Mayer, Victoria Beckham, Lena Dunham, and Zach Braff to use or mention its service.

Bitstrips was bought by Snapchat in March 2016 for a sum reported to be US$100 million. Brown has never publicly disclosed his share of profits from the sale.

Personal

Brown is married to Katie Minsky and has two children.