39. Joye Brown

By all reports (including ours), the climate in the newsroom at Newsday is a little less than comfortable these days. The paper’s current ownership has almost no experience in journalism, and as such, there are questionable editorial policies, dubious business strategies and general unrest. This makes Joye Brown all the more essential. The voice of Newsday, Browne started at the paper in 1983, and worked there as a reporter, an editor, a newsroom administrator and an editorial writer. Since 2006, she has been a columnist at the paper—following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Murray Kempton, Ed Lowe and Jimmy Breslin—and her words have become essential reading for LI. And while many of her contemporaries have been silenced or marginalized, the resonance of Brown’s voice has grown more amplified, as both Newsday and LI undergo dramatic upheavals. They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Today, in Brown’s case, the pen is mightier even than the paper.