PR Profiles

“The best thing about being in PR is you can change the conversation,” says Abbi Whitaker, President of The Abbi Agency in Reno, Nevada. Recognized as a 2020 Top Woman in PR by PRNEWS, Abbi started her agency almost 14 years ago after noticing a void for “really thoughtful PR” in Nevada. “It was...

Karen Swim is a true PR powerhouse, no doubt about it. Not only does she run her successful virtual agency, Words for Hire, but she also has, “the joy and pleasure of leading a professional organization for independent PR practitioners” called Solo PR Pro. For her, Solo PR Pro is more than a...

“I started my career in the boiler room of a small financial services practice making over a hundred cold calls most days,” says Brian Hart, the founder of Flackable, an award-winning PR agency in Philadelphia. For a recent college grad who had just interned at a large PR agency and wanted to get...

“When I was a kid, I would go to the library and get stuck in there,” says Michelle Egan from her office in Anchorage, Alaska. “Not because I would sit down and read a book, but because I would go from section to section, learn a little something about each and then move on.” Being in...

 “It’s been ingrained in me to watch the news early in the morning,” says Annie Scranton, founder and president of Pace Public Relations and host of the PR Pace podcast. “Without reading and consuming the news voraciously I wouldn’t be able to do my job.” Before she started her industry-agnostic...

“My story is a story,” says Melissa Agnes with a laugh, recalling how she, an entrepreneur since she was 21, got into crisis communications. Thirteen years ago, Melissa had no idea she would one day be an expert in crisis comms—or that it was even a field she could specialize in. At the time,...

Before he was the president of a successful PR agency celebrating 30 years in San Francisco, David Landis was a classical pianist. It seems only right then that some of Landis Communications Inc. (LCI)’s first clients were in the entertainment industry. While the agency now specializes in tech,...

Gini Dietrich’s been part of a lot of PR projects, but she may be best known for the PESO model and Spin Sucks, a blog, podcast and book. Spin Sucks was launched as an experimental agency blog for Arment Dietrich back in 2006, but quickly progressed from agency blog to industry resource. “We...