Welcome Back, Dr. Brown

The new and improved John Brown's Public Diplomacy Press & Blog Review 2.0

Back when we launched the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in 2003, Geoff Cowan whose vision and inspiration it was to found the center, said that we needed something (or, more specifically, someone) to make the website a destination site.

Cue: John H. Brown, a then-recently-retired U.S. foreign service veteran who shortly before, on March 10, 2003, was one of three U.S. foreign service officers to retire from the U.S. foreign service in protest of the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq. Brown was 20-year veteran of the foreign service who had served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow.

For his sins (and commitment to coverage and improvement of public diplomacy) after resigning, John started a modest email newsletter called the Public Diplomacy Press Review (later changed to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Press Review and finally John Brown's Public Diplomacy Press & Blog Review -- an ode to the quality of news and information he was finding in the blogosphere). He kindly added me to the list in June 2003.

Public Diplomacy, waaaay back then in 2003 was still at the beginning of a trend toward a vogue apex resulting in a burst of greater visibility in media and government and now blogs, blogs, blogs and more blogs. It would eventually, perhaps briefly, morph into a euphemism for a/the panacea to aid the ailing the image of the U.S. And John would chronicle that, spending literally thousands of hours surfing the web and the print world, reading news in half a dozen or more languages (all spoken by him), summarizing, linking, and acerbically commenting on how the world saw and the media covered "public diplomacy."

The newsletter captured everything, it seemed, from the evolution of post-USIA, post-Soviet public diplomacy, to the budding public diplomacy efforts of South Africa and Taiwan, to the continuing battle for the heart and soul of what is, waht was and what might be "public diplomacy." John's reports were voluminous at times: a breathless, impassioned, encyclopaedic, memory dump of information churned out daily, seven days per week, with a few annual and much-apologized-for "days off." As the rise of independent voices came onto the scene before the blogging about public diplomacy took off, John carried individual essays and columns in his newsletter.

Erstwhile webby that I am, or webzinester, natch, I saw a partnership with John as an opportunity to archive the precious news gems that John was digging up and otherwise emailing into the ether (with all due respect to Google's email archives ...) by hosting them on the web for posterity and, perhaps, permanence. And so it was that we offered to host John Brown's newsletter on our website. By the time we got the website up-and-running, John had cultivated the newsletter into a must-read among the Washington power elite as well as the not-so-powerful and not-so-elite, and, more interestingly, governments around the world.

John stopped publishing the Press & Blog review on the USC web site earlier this year. After which, I immediately began urging him to create his own blog. Blogging software is now so ubiquitous and user-friendly, I argued, that it would be very easy for him to re-launch the PDP&BR (an acronym I could never spit out because it conjured up acronymic images of a blog about Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwiches) under his own editorial moniker.

On September 1, 2008, five and a half years since his resignation from the foreign service, roughly 120 days before the end of the Bush Administration, and the policies that pre-empted John Brown's career, or should we say, redirected it, and still in the throes of a very real culture war and perhaps less-clear idea of the future of public diplomacy, I was delighted to find in my email inbox the newly revived indie John Brown's Public Diplomacy Press & Blog Review 2.0.

Dr. Brown, we hardly knew ye! But it's good to have you back.