Jeff Browne came to Stevenson in August 2022 to teach Communication classes and to advise the Villager. Browne has been a journalist and journalism adviser since 1979, his junior year at Lincoln East High School in Nebraska. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska and a master’s degree in English education from the University of Florida.

He worked as a reporter at the Boca Raton News, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and the Gainesville Sun during the 1980s. He turned to education in 1990, and his students at Smoky Hill High School in 1996 won the state’s top journalism award, the CHSPA Sweepstakes Award. As adviser to the Rocky Mountain Collegian, his students at Colorado State University in 2004 earned a Pacemaker Award, considered the “Pulitzer Prize of scholastic journalism.” He also served as the director of Student Media at CSU from 2004-2008, advising radio, television, newspaper, online journalism and magazine.

Jeff and his students at the University of Colorado in 2016 won the Best of Competition Award at the Broadcast Education Association national convention for the full-length documentary “Taking the Lede: Colorado Edition,” about scholastic journalism in the Centennial State. The next year, he and his students’ second documentary film, “¿Cómo Fue? A Cuban Journey,”  was shown in film festivals around the U.S. and in Cuba. It featured the heroic story of Guillermo Vidal’s rise from Peter Pan refugee to the Denver Mayor’s Office.

He also taught at the University of Kansas, where he served as the executive director of the Kansas Scholastic Press Association and as the director of the Kansas Journalism Institute. Most recently, Browne served as the executive director of the Quill and Scroll journalism honor society and taught journalism classes at the University of Iowa.