Alumni Spotlight: Brie Jackson

The Winter 2023 issue of ONE MARYLAND Magazine recently arrived in the mailboxes of Terrapin Club members. ONE MARYLAND features stories of strength and perseverance, of determination and spirit. These stories define our athletics program, and this new magazine will allow us to share these stories with you. Over the next few weeks, we will be rolling out these stories on umterps.com as a preview of what you will find in ONE MARYLAND. To receive future issues of the magazine when they debut, please join the Terrapin Club. We hope you enjoy.

Maryland alumna Brie Jackson had plenty of stamina when she was on the women’s basketball team from 2000-03. Now in her role as a Washington D.C. Correspondent for NBC News, stamina has taken on a whole new meeting.

After years of covering news in Capitol Hill and politics, Jackson rose to her current role with NBC at the end of 2021. She is a morning news reporter, working with over 20 news stations around the country daily. 

Jackson, a 2003 graduate, wakes up between midnight and 12:30 a.m., checks emails and then gets to the news station by 1:30 a.m. She writes and produces a story on the day’s political news and has her first hit with the Early Today Show at 3:30 a.m. The adjustment to morning news hours was not an easy one.

“I've been working on the Hill and covering the White House since the Trump administration and this is the first time I've been working mornings,” Jackson said. “Normally, I was doing kind of Capitol Hill hours where it was like 9:00 and then you're getting off at like 6:30 p.m. This one, it's a lifestyle change where I'm going to bed when most people are getting home from work.”

“It really is an adjustment as you learn the importance of time management, getting enough sleep, so that you can get up in the morning and present for six hours without being tired,” Jackson said. “So it's training your body. It's similar to playing sports, you're training your body, for the year.”

Jackson does live hits on over 20 news stations around the country for over six hours. Each station, each anchor is different, keeping the job interesting.

“What is the best is interacting with all the different stations, all the different television stations because I mean, I talk to so many different anchors and reporters and they all have their own style,” Jackson said. “So they'll ask about my story and then in a different way or a similar way. So I start with NBC4 here in DC and talk with Jummy Olabanji and Eun Yang and, you know, they're fast-paced, so New York and D.C. are very fast-paced. Where, you know, I get to like the Midwest or I get to Las Vegas. That's probably one of my favorite stations because the anchor there, Kim Wagner, she's very conversational and she's really just talking to you like you're having coffee when she's talking about whatever has happened in politics today. So it's not hard-hitting but, she's feeding the politics in a conversational way so that you're not trying to digest too much while you're drinking your coffee in the morning.

“In the morning, that's truly personality, like you get a sense of all the different people's personalities because typically mornings are two-hour shows, so you have a little bit more time to have a conversation. Where in the evening, you have 30 minutes to get these stories across so you really just have to give you know, stick to the facts.”

Last fall, Jackson found some time off and married Jennifer Iudicello. 

“We got married on the Friday after the election, so it was a busy week. Midterm elections were on Tuesday and we got married Friday,” Jackson said.