What is a Brown, anyway? Good question. In this case, the Brown is Paul Brown, who became the team’s first head coach when it was a member of the All-America Football Conference from 1946 to 1949 before joining the NFL in 1950. Originally, Cleveland Panthers was selected in a name-the-team contest, but a local businessman blocked its use because he still owned the rights to that name, which had been adopted by a defunct 1926 team that played in the first American Football League. A second name-the-team contest was held to find a replacement, and since many people had already taken to calling it “Brown’s team,” Browns became the popular choice. Although Paul Brown wasn’t crazy about the idea, it worked for Ohioans, who admired Brown’s incredible record as a high school coach in Massillon, Ohio, and for guiding Ohio State to a national championship. At various times, the team has used a cartoon creation called Brownie the Elf as a mascot, but it has never been used as a logo on the team’s helmets, maybe because he’s a little too childish looking.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
