If the "About The Author" capsule over there isn't enough information for you, read on for the whole sordid story.
Massachusetts native? Yes. I spent the first few years of my life in Cambridge, Mass., but I grew up mostly in Exeter, N.H., just over the state line. I always thought if there was going to be a bestselling author named Brown from Exeter, it would be me. But then that SOB wrote "The DaVinci Code" ...
After college, I worked as a reporter for The Recorder in Greenfield, Mass., then for the Daily Southtown, a suburban paper on Chicago's South Side, first as a hard-news reporter and then as TV columnist and all-around arts guy.
Chicago was great fun. After a decade in the midwest, though, we really wanted to come home to Massachusetts. I was hired as TV Editor of the Boston Herald in 1998 and became executive arts editor a few years later. I loved the cynical camaraderie of the big-city tabloid newsroom. But, well ... you know what's happening in the newspaper business. We all joked that we were playing "Newsroom Survivor," and sure enough, in May 2005 I was voted off the island, along with several dozen other people.
Act Two. Fade in: I started freelancing that summer. Soon I sold my first piece to the Boston Globe, about the 40th anniversary of the famous UFO "Incident at Exeter." Since then I've written a couple of hundred features for the Globe, primarily in the Arts and North sections and lately the Sunday magazine. Over the years, I've also written for a wildly assorted group of outlets that includes Bay Windows, Broadcasting & Cable, Wired, Art News and AOL Travel.
Just a few days after I left the Herald, I started the HubArts.com blog, which has become a staple source for news on the Boston arts scene. I also began using the Internet and social media in a larger way professionally. In '06-'08, I worked for a Cambridge dotcom startup that was eventually sold to a site called MeeVee.com, and thus found myself back on the TV beat, getting paid more to blog about "Mad Men" than I ever made at a dead-trees publication. Perhaps needless to say, that was too good to last. Since MeeVee folded at the end of '08, I've been freelance full-time.
I live in a nice little house on the edge of downtown Newburyport, with my wife and our dog and two cats. We've been here for 12 years and love it. I go to Fenway Park and Symphony Hall regularly, but not nearly as often as I go to Plum Island. Newburyport is just what we were looking for, combining the beauty of the classic New England small town with a lively arts scene, all right on the ocean. As the book says, it's a pretty nice place to live, and hardly anyone ever gets murdered here.
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