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The son of a pioneer Seattle newspaperman, Ashmun Brown began his career in journalism in 1890 as a reporter in Seattle. For the next fifteen years he held reporting and editorial positions with newspapers in Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, Victoria, Spokane, Butte and Anaconda. From 1905 to 1907 he was Private Secretary to Governor Albert Mead of Washington, after which he relocated at Washington, D.C., beginning his career as a capitol reporter. He left reporting in 1910 and 1911 to serve as Private Secretary to Secretary of Interior Richard Ballinger and, after a short interlude as a periodical editor, returned to reporting the news of the national capitol for his former employer, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

From 1914 until his retirement in the early 1940's, Brown was the Washington Bureau correspondent successively for the Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times and the Providence (R.I.) Journal and Evening Bulletin. During this time he wrote about 25,000 stories, features and columns. His reporting tended to reflect his Republican connections in Washington, but was characterized by a proper journalistic non-partisanship. His coverage of national administrations of both political parties and of the Washington and Rhode Island delegations to Congress, both having members of each party, was quite complete. This thoroughness of reporting earned him a citation from the Pulitzer Prize Committee in 1936.