Below is an open letter to Lea-Ann Germinder, president of PRSA/New York and president of Germinder & Assocs., New York and Kansas City, specialist in animal health. It hosts the website www.goodnewsforpets.com.

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The Germinder firm, which employs six in Kansas City and has an office at 230 Park Ave., New York, has launched more than 125 campaigns in animal health and hundreds more in other markets, according to the firm’s website.

In the e-mail below to Germinder as well as board members of the chapter, we ask whether there will be any limits on the directories, books or other materials that we can exhibit at the Career Forum that the chapter is sponsoring April 2 at the Kimmel Center of New York University.

Press coverage is not allowed but publishers who pay $1,000 can exhibit, says the chapter. Some 300 students are expected to attend, paying a $10 fee for a day’s program that includes lunch.

Germinder’s response today is that she needs to consult with the board about what would or would not be allowed at our exhibit table and that this may take 24 to 48 hours.

Hi Lea-Ann and Board Members, PRSA/NY:

I am thinking of paying the $1,000 to be an exhibitor at the Career Forum April 2 but want to know if there are any conditions on what I could exhibit. I would put on the table at least a dozen books and directories including those of PR Week/U.S. and past directories of members of PRSA. I would hand out about 30 pages of stories that I have written about PRSA lately including the Career Forums in New York and Atlanta.

Your office at 230 Park ave. is only a couple of blocks from mine at 271 Madison ave. (39-40th sts.). I invite you to come this week or next week to see the hundreds of books about PR, marketing, etc., that I have collected over the past 45 years.

It is well known that trust starts with personal meetings. These are very rare these days between journalists and PR people and I am far from the only one making this observation.

Why would anyone, and particularly talented minorities, want to enter an occupation which has low and sometimes no pay (internships), and a high degree of stress? Your chapter has made a special point of saying the April 2 Career Forum targets minorities.

The conduct of the career forums in Atlanta and New York illustrate the pressures on PR people who are often blocking information and an age of a deluge of information. Is there any reason why you wouldn’t come to my office, meet me personally, and see our extensive PR library?

PRSA champions “the free flow of information.”

How can PRSA block or impede information on the subject of careers?

I will take the six-foot table described on the Chapter website if I have freedom to exhibit whatever I want. Where would this table be? I could go to the Kimmel Center at New York University and check this out.

My literature table would include the following although this list is by no means complete.

  • O’Dwyer’s Directory of PR Firms
  • Contact directory of PR Week/U.S., 2012 Edition, the last printed edition of this work
  • PRSA members’ directory (1,000-page listing of members that was a marvelous job-hunting tool and was last published in 2005)
  • Army of Entrepreneurs which describes the go-go life of PR agency staffers
  • Always Live Better Than Your Clients, which describes the “night club” that Benjamin Sonnenberg ran in his five-story New York townhouse that often entertained 200 clients, media and agency people at once with dinner and movies in a 50-seat theater, the entire operation bankrolled by client money
  • Deadly Spin by Wendell Potter that describes 20 years of corporate PR life
  • The Tylenol Mafia which is 719 pages of evidence that the poisoning of Tylenol capsules in 1982 happened while the ingredients were under the control of Johnson & Johnson
  • Set of 12 O’Dwyer’s magazines, each one with scores of profiles of special practices of PR firms


Cordially,

Jack