Greene, Marilyn (Marilyn J.)

Dates

• Existence: 1945    

Biography

Marilyn Judith Greene (born June 2, 1945) is a journalist and media consultant. Greene spent most of her career working for Gannett Inc., first at member papers in upstate New York and later at the newly formed USA Today. While at USA Today, Greene traveled the globe with a team of Gannett reporters on the JetCapade, founder Al Neuharth’s 1988 global interview project; covered the George H.W. Bush White House, following the Bushes on state visits around the world; reported on the Gulf War (Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield); interviewed foreign dignitaries from Europe, Asia and the Middle East; and covered the aftermath of natural disasters in Japan and Haiti.

Greene grew up in Clifton Park, New York; the daughter of osteopaths Dr. Phillip A. Greene and Dr. M. Elizabeth Peck and sister to Janet (1940-1984) and Duane (1942- ). She attended Shenendehowa High School, then went on to Syracuse University for her freshman and sophomore years of college. During the summer after her freshman year, 1963, she worked as a journalism intern at NASA. While there, she met her first husband, fellow NASA intern and Northwestern journalism student Emerson Moran. She spent the spring semester of her sophomore year studying abroad in Poitiers, France before touring other parts of Europe with the organization Student Religious Liberals. She enrolled at Northwestern for her junior and senior years, eloping with Moran in August 1965 after her junior year. She gave birth to their first two children, twins David and Daniel, the following August shortly after her graduation. Greene and Moran both began working at papers in upstate New York, and their third son, Patrick, was born in 1972. Greene and Moran divorced in 1977, and Greene and her sons moved to Ithaca, where she was a reporter and then features editor at the Ithaca Journal. She married Joseph Junod, another Journal editor, on May 1, 1982. After a year in Honolulu, then China as a Gannett Asia Fellow, Greene moved with her husband and sons to the Washington, D.C. area to work with Gannett News Service and later USA Today.

Greene returned to the University of Hawaii in 1993 as a Jefferson Fellow, again capping off her fellowship experience with a trip to Asia. She served as executive director of the World Press Freedom Committee, a coordination group including 44 affiliated journalistic organizations on six continents, from the late 1990s until the mid-2000s. In 2005, she was named a Knight Fellow, and spent three months in Cameroon teaching seminars on press freedom and meeting local journalists. Her work as a consultant would later lead her to interview U.S. diplomatic personnel involved in the 2006 evacuation of the Beirut embassy for the State Department, and to conduct similar interviews for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.

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