Introduction: As a PR News Editorial Advisory Board Member, I was recently asked to write a brief testimonial on what PR News means to me as a long-time professional in the PR field. The following is what I wrote to them, reflecting not only on PR News but on the upcoming Centennial of the professional practice of media public relations in America.
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I find PR News to be an excellent source of relevant, useful and
actionable information on the fast-trending state of the art in professional
public and media relations. Social networking, the Internet and other
transformative changes have altered the face of PR beyond the easy recognition of my
PR professors from 40 years ago. As I strive to remain both current and
relevant in this “brave new world” of 21st Century public relations,
I find my weekly “fix” of PR News is an invaluable resource for me.
It is often hard to remember that PR – often joked about as
being “the second oldest profession" – actually had its modern birth during the
First World War, when several pioneers helped the Wilson Administration prepare
a peace-loving and isolationist nation that had not been directly attacked for its role in
saving democracy in what was then the “civilized world.” A
quarter-century later, our profession took several great leaps forward as
masters of PR – including Churchill, Goebbels, Stalin and FDR – all used the
fast-evolving tools of public and media relations, as defined by and
constrained by their own totalitarian or democratic nations – to bend reality
to suit their needs, to motivate their nations to aggression or defense.
This battle for the hearts and minds of the world continued for another 45 years until the end of the Cold War. Perhaps not so ironically, this Cold War
was brought to a successful conclusion in no small part by the “Great
Communicator” and master of mass communications public relations, President
Reagan, who used PR techniques to push the Soviet Union into a "coffin corner" from which it could not emerge.
Along the way, in the civilian and business world, public
relations morphed from a radical new (and to some, suspect) adjunct to more
conventional business communications into a C-level profession. There, modern PR pros have helped to
guide corporations and non-profits as they shaped their own realities, trying
to put a credible “best foot forward” in pursuit of their legitimate business
or charitable goals. And the people who handled PR for clients and
employers also morphed, from ex-journalists looking for better pay (if not a
more exciting life) into well-trained PR professionals who sought ways of
learning, exercising and demonstrating their professionalism.
And it was into this world that PR News was born and came to its
own level of maturity, as the preeminent trade newspaper and journal of those
in the public relations profession who took their profession seriously.
This essential source of news and information has helped to guide a generation
of PR pros through the most tumultuous transformation of their profession since
Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays pioneered the practice of professional public
relations a century ago. At no time since the era when those founders
shaped the practice, ethics and professionalism of modern PR has our profession
or trade changed so dramatically. From the manual typewriter and the
hand-delivered (or mailed) press release to digital press release placement
services, from the hot-lead Linotype to the hot-electron E-zine, my generation of PR pros has
weathered a great many changes. Much of my own success in making this
transition is due to the writers, editors and publishers of PR News, who each
week keep me updated with insights on trends – and help me discern the
difference between real transformation and hit-and-run fads that will disappear
as quickly as they arrived.
This testimonial is a bit longer than I’d planned, but the more
I thought about what PR News means to me, the more I realized that I had to put
it – and our shared profession – into proper context to really make the case
for just how essential PR News really is.
As a note to put this testimonial into context, I began studying
PR in 1969; I had my first client (while still in college) in 1972, and I got
my first PR job in 1973. Five years later, I became the youngest person
ever (to that time, anyway), to earn accreditation from PRSA, and six years
later, I became the first person to be named Fellow in the area of PR and
Marketing by the American Hospital Association. By that time, I’d written
two published books on PR (my current total is eleven, including one ghost-written
for a client and published earlier in 2014), and I’d become a well-received
speaker at professional conferences. I first opened my agency in late
1985, and over the course of my career, I have bounced between client-side and
agency-side in roughly equal measure.
Over the course of a long career, I
have owned my own solo practice, and I’ve been a senior exec at the Silicon
Valley subsidiary of Fleishman-Hillard, then and now the world’s largest PR
firm. I won a wall full of awards, culminating in PRSA’s coveted Silver
Anvil, and I’ve taught PR as an adjunct professor at two universities and
several colleges. However, primarily, I serve my clients, using the best new
tools and techniques – firmly grounded in the best of traditional PR, which
remains as relevant today as it was in the days of Lee and Bernays – and, for
the past decade and more, guided by my weekly ally, PR News.
Labels: client relations, customer relations, Edward Bernays, employee relations, investor relations, Ivy Lee, Joseph Goebbels, media relations, PR, PR News, public relations