Karen Brown

Karen Brown is a radio journalist who focuses on health care, mental health, children’s issues, and other topics about the human condition. She has been a full-time radio reporter since 1998 for WFCR, the NPR affiliate in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her pieces have also aired nationally on National Public Radio, American RadioWorks, Marketplace Radio, Justice Talking, Primetime Radio, and Voice of America.

Karen also produces radio documentaries, focusing on mental health, as a way to give more depth and voice to the topics she covers in her daily reporting. Documentary subjects have included bipolar disorder in children, “well” siblings of the mentally ill, and mental health care for refugees.

For the 2008-2009 year, she is a Kaiser Media Fellow – which will allow her to focus on health reform in Massachusetts – what’s working, what’s not, and how people on the ground are affected. The program is funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Previous fellowships include a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, and a Kaiser Family Foundation mini-fellowship.

Her pieces have won a number of national awards, including the National Edward R. Murrow Award, the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, New York Festival’s Silver Baton, Public Radio News Directors, Inc. (PRNDI) Award, the National Mental Health Association’s Media Award, a Gracie Allen Award from the Association of Women in Radio and Televison, Dart Award for Coverage of Trauma (hon. mention), and the Association of Health Care Journalists Award (First Place).

Karen previously worked as a print reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has freelanced for The Washington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, and other publications. She earned a Masters of Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996.

She lives with her husband Sean, and twin children, Sam and Lucy, in Northampton, Massachusetts.