Larry Foster
Larry Foster

The Arthur W. Page Center will honor Bill George, Gwen Ifill and John Onoda with its Larry Foster Awards at a ceremony to be held at New York City’s Grand Hyatt Hotel tonight.

The Larry Foster Awards recognize professional excellence in public relations and journalism. They are named for Lawrence G. Foster, who started the public relations department at Johnson & Johnson and whose insistence on pursuing a PR campaign based on straightforwardness and honesty were pivotal in the company’s recovery from the 1982 Tylenol scandal.

George, a senior fellow at Harvard Business School, is the former CEO of medical device company Medtronic. Ifill, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, co-anchored the PBS NewsHour and was the moderator of the network’s Washington Week in Review. She died in 2016. Ononda led corporate communications departments at such companies as Levi Strauss, General Motors, Visa USA and Charles Schwab before going to FleishmanHillard as a senior consultant. In 2018, he joined the strategy execution firm Gagen MacDonald.

The awards dinner is a fundraiser that supports research by communications faculty and professionals around the world.