ELY — Though journalist Aaron J. Brown has never set foot in a mine, make no mistake, he is a Ranger.
Representing the fifth generation of his family on the Iron Range, Brown is the first to choose slinging words over slinging a hammer.
And though he doesn’t salvage cars as his father did, he’s learned how to rescue a dangling participle or two.
Brown has made a name for himself – or a byline, rather – while intentionally choosing to stay put in a rural area that often taught its youth that success was found elsewhere. Part of his deal for working at the Star Tribune was that he work remotely so that he and his wife, Christina, could continue raising their family on the Iron Range. 
That career trajectory brought him to give a talk at the Grand Ely Lodge to a group of news-conscious citizens.
“I’m not from Ely – it’s a character fault, I know,” Brown said as an opener, “but this region has been a part of my blood for five generations.”
Brown, a native of Hibbing, grew up on the mining stories of his grandfathers. Tales of trudging through ankle-deep water, falls down mine shafts in Eveleth, and the innate dangers of mining iron ore were common conversation.
His father continued the tradition of hard work through physical labor when he took over his father’s salvage company.
The Brown and Sons salvage yard was the stage for young Brown’s mind to wander. What he found was he wasn’t interested in the mechanics of the cars that arrived wrecked and ready to be rebuilt (or tossed).
Instead, what he took from the wreckage was a keen interest in writing the stories of the place he called home. 
The current Star Tribune columnist began his love affair with the news industry working at WEVE Radio Station in Eveleth, an AM/FM station that played adult contemporary music. He worked at night during high school to earn enough money to put himself through college. 
He returned as a 21-year-old reporter to the Hibbing Daily Tribune to become the “youngest person in the room that was also a boss” after he landed an editor’s role.
The role had been passed over a couple of times by other journalists before his boss took a chance on making him the editor. When the Associated Press picked up the news of the youngest editor on the Range, Brown’s boss, who thought he was 28, said, “You’re not really 21, are you?”
He continued to work locally for other newspapers like the Mesabi Tribune, eventually becoming a teacher, blogger, and now columnist at the Star Tribune.
His approach to storytelling is to write from the core of something you know. For him, that’s the Range.
Many journalists want to write about the latest outrage or controversy, Brown said, but that doesn’t always make meaningful copy. The key to a story that will continue to sit with the reader long after is for the journalist to “go where the people are.”
“I look for stories that are something unique that I could only write because I talked to you,” Brown said. In that vein, he’s been finding stories of Minnesota and of his own history to share.
One of his more recent columns outlined his experience flying over the Range for the first time, of being able to see from the sky how mining had shaped the land he loved – land that may have to change significantly, according to Brown, to offer success for future generations. 
“We tend to resist change and focus on our small world at the expense of the larger world,” Brown said.
That means mining might not bring the renaissance that it offered decades ago. With the advent of certain technologies changing the scope of mining, it will be important to find other economic solutions to keep the Iron Range thriving.
Brown is not here to take sides in that long-held argument, he said, but to ask questions such as, “Where is a mining area that successfully spun off and did something else?”
“Bigger macro growth is about people congregating and building something,” Brown said.
And just as his predecessors built the communities of the Range, so will the current generation build the future.
As he writes in his 2008 book, “Overburden,” “This history molded the last five of my family’s generations and will shape the lives of my children.”
And though his children are grown now, he’s not going anywhere.