Advice from the PR Pros: Donald Wright

The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication has conducted oral history interviews with dozens of the nation’s most influential public relations practitioners. The Page Center website features a vast collection of transcripts and videos of these interviews. On this blog, we will highlight some of the advice given by professionals on attaining positions in the field of public relations.

Don Wright is the Harold Burson Professor and Chair in Public Relations at Boston University. His areas of specialization include crisis management, employee communications/internal relations, reputation management and social responsibility. Professor Wright has worked full-time in corporate, agency and university public relations, and has been a corporate communications consultant for three decades.

For PR Pros, more trust equals more responsibility

“Being a huge fan of Harold Burson and being in the Harold Burson endowed professorship at Boston University, I do tend to admire a lot of things that Harold has written. And he has described the way the field has changed over the 60+ years that he’s been in the field and he’s described it by saying when he first entered the public relations business in the late 1940s and early 1950s that essentially, what he was asked to do was answer the question ‘How should we say it?’ The decisions about what to say, the decisions about what to do and how to do it, had all been made by others.”

“And the public relations people were almost like the journalists in residence. They were not involved at all as they are today in the strategic planning and so forth and so on.”

“We did a good job according to Harold in helping to answer that question, ‘How should we say it?’ So our counsel was sought relative to, ‘What should we say?’ And it progress upwards so today in the nation’s most highly successful companies, public relations… the chief public relations officer… is very much involved in the dominant coalition, the decision making realm of the organization. So public relations today deals with; what should we do, how should we do it, what should we say, and how should we say it?”

“I think you will find that at least the better public relations programs have adapted to kind of follow that development over the years.”