Brandon Brown
Brandon Brown is a senior reporter at the Phoenix Business Journal who connects restaurant, retail, hospitality and sports business coverage through detailed, deal-focused stories on openings, expansions and closures. He has spent much of the past decade in the publication’s newsroom, returning in 2017 after an earlier stint and building a beat that now spans food concepts, consumer-facing brands and major venues. His work has been honored in regional journalism contests for authoritative, sustained coverage, particularly on complex sports business sagas.
Restaurant growth, leases and local brands
Much of Brown’s recent reporting centers on how restaurant operators expand, relocate and experiment with new formats, with a focus on the business mechanics behind each move. He covers long-running local chains such as Spinato’s Pizzeria, tracking stories from a lease for a new West Valley location to earlier pieces on the brand’s partnerships with entertainment companies and professional sports teams.
His work follows how restaurant groups secure space in emerging districts, including coverage of tenants signing on to major mixed-use projects in growing heritage areas. Brown regularly highlights new concepts and rebrands, such as an Italian restaurant replacing a longstanding sushi venue in a hotel setting and a well-known chef launching a neighborhood restaurant, emphasizing investment, renovation and positioning details. He also reports on restaurant components within larger institutions, including the expansion and relocation of dining operations as part of multimillion-dollar campus projects at cultural museums.
Across these stories, he treats food coverage as business reporting, dwelling on leases, build-out timelines, capital commitments and how operators expect to draw customers.
Hospitality, retail and consumer spaces
Brown extends his food beat into broader hospitality and retail coverage, following how hotels, malls and experiential spaces compete for visitors and spending. He analyzes hotel building trends, including a recent story explaining why one state is adding more hotels than any other, tying room growth to tourism demand and investor confidence.
His reporting includes work on hospitality design firms whose retreats inform new concepts for restaurants, hotels and bars, linking aesthetics and layout decisions to brand differentiation and guest experience.
In retail, he has covered sales performance at prominent shopping centers, documenting cases where one fashion mall’s revenue declined while other area malls grew, and exploring implications for tenants and landlords. Brown’s coverage often connects wage policy and cost pressures to front-line service businesses, as in pieces explaining upcoming minimum wage increases and their impact on employers in hospitality and retail.
This strand of his beat shows him treating consumer spaces as business assets, paying attention to occupancy, sales trends and labor costs rather than lifestyle angles.
Sports business, arenas and transportation hubs
Sports business is a recurring pillar in Brown’s work, where he follows teams, arenas and sponsors through a business lens. His coverage of the now-defunct Arizona Coyotes and their extended search for a viable arena site earned first-place recognition for sports beat reporting, reflecting a sustained series of stories on dealmaking and political hurdles.
He reports on major events and venue performance, including a story on a suburban arena setting a single-day gross record when hosting a high-profile mixed martial arts event. Brown tracks sponsorship and branding deals, such as the Phoenix Suns replacing a previous jersey sponsor with a company from the Scottsdale market, detailing the business relationship and visibility stakes on and off the court.
His beat also touches league expansion, with reporting on investor groups bidding for a potential NBA franchise in Las Vegas and what that could mean for existing markets and ownership structures. Beyond arenas, he covers transportation infrastructure tied to travel and tourism, including a planned multibillion-dollar terminal project at a major international airport and the facility’s repeated ranking among the top mega airports nationwide.
Taken together, these stories show him approaching sports and mobility as interconnected businesses with complex revenue streams, real estate plays and brand partnerships.
Format, platforms and reporting style
Brown frequently describes his beat as covering retail, restaurants, hospitality and tourism alongside small business, and his output reflects that multi-sector scope. His stories are often part of ongoing coverage rather than one-off pieces, as seen in a recent series and cover story dissecting the bankruptcy and unraveling of a fast-growing salad chain.
He pairs quick-turn news on leases, openings and sponsorships with deeper explainer pieces that contextualize trends in hotel construction, wage changes or franchise expansion. His reporting reaches audiences beyond print, appearing under his name on a regional television news site where his Business Journal stories on restaurants, business and infrastructure are republished with dual credit. Brown also appears as a guest on broadcast segments to discuss his coverage, offering concise summaries of developments like hotel building booms while pointing listeners back to his detailed reporting.
Across platforms, his style is direct and business-focused, prioritizing numbers, contractual details and stakeholder perspectives over personality profiles or dining reviews.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.