 Kenneth Morris |
The little-known stories of the Black PR pioneers who helped shape today’s PR industry will be the subject of a Feb. 1 event being sponsored by the Museum of Public Relations.
The event, which kicks off the second annual Black PR History Month, will be hosted by Dr. Rochelle L. Ford, chair of the Public Relations Department at Syracuse University’s S.I Newhouse School of Public Communications and editor of Ofield: The Autobiography of Public Relations Man Ofield Dukes.
The keynote speaker will be Kenneth Morris, a descendant of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington as well as co-founder and president of Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, an organization that works to keep alive the legacy of Douglass and Washington. Morris will speak about the communications lessons that the first black PR professionals have to teach those working in the industry today.
There will be a panel discussion centered around the need for diverse role models for those beginning their PR careers. The panel’s participants are set to include Ford as well as Dr. Denise Hill of Elon University; Weber Shandwick senior VP, diversity and inclusion, Judith Harrison; Donald Singletary, president of The Singletary Group, and Reputation Doctor president Mike Paul.
The event will take place at Lubin House, at 11 East 61st Street in New York, and will run from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. The cost is $50 general admission and $5 for students. For more information or to register, go to the museum’s website.
While AI may have made the basics of generating content easier and more efficient, it has also made it more difficult for a brand to stand out from an ever-growing crowd of voices and platforms, according to a report from Public Relations Global Network and Greenough Communications.
Only 15 percent of the CEOs polled in a new survey from Boathouse think that their CMO merits an “A” for job performance, as opposed to the 53 percent who rank their CMO as “average."
A growing sense of fragmentation when it comes to health issues is leading to greater distrust of both the healthcare industry and the media that reports on it, according to the newly released 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer.
The philanthropy sector appears to be losing its position on the moral high ground, according to the Global Risk Advisory Council’s Reputation Risk Index for Q1 2026.
