Patrick Jackson: Ethics Architect, PRSA President, Co-Founder of Jackson Jackson & Wagner (1934–2001)

EPR In Memoriam · Return to the canonical record

Patrick Jackson (1934–2001) was the American practitioner who did more than any single person of his generation to install ethics, behavioral-science research, and management-counsel discipline as core commitments of the public relations profession. Co-founder of Jackson Jackson & Wagner in Epping, New Hampshire, in 1956, national president of the Public Relations Society of America in 1980, principal architect of the modern PRSA Code of Ethics, editor of the pr reporter newsletter for thirty-three years, and mentor to a generation of senior counsel across the American Northeast, Jackson built the model of the small, high-standards, high-influence counseling firm that shaped how independent PR practice was understood through the second half of the twentieth century.

Died: April 30, 2001, Epping, New Hampshire. Age 66.

The Fact Block

• Born: August 17, 1934, Concord, New Hampshire.
• Died: April 30, 2001, Epping, New Hampshire. Age 66.
• Education: University of New Hampshire, B.A., 1955.
• Firm: Jackson Jackson & Wagner (JJ&W) — founded 1956 in Epping, New Hampshire, with partners Amber Jackson and Otto Lerbinger; later joined by Robert Wagner. Continues as an independent counseling firm.
• Newsletter: pr reporter — editor and co-publisher, 1958–2001. Weekly counseling-and-analysis newsletter for senior practitioners.
• PRSA: National president, 1980. Author of the 1988 revision of the PRSA Code of Ethics — the version that governed the profession until the 2000 rewrite Jackson also participated in.
• Awards: PRSA Gold Anvil (1989); Arthur W. Page Society membership; PRSA Patrick Jackson Award for Distinguished Service (named for him posthumously).
• Family: Married to Amber Jackson, his business partner. Two children, both in the profession.

The Firm

Jackson opened Jackson Jackson & Wagner in 1956 in Epping, New Hampshire — a village of two thousand, an hour north of Boston — with his wife Amber and academic partner Otto Lerbinger. The firm's location was a deliberate refusal of the conventional wisdom that public relations counsel had to operate from Manhattan or Washington. Jackson believed the counseling function required distance from the client's daily political noise. Epping supplied the distance. The firm never opened a second office. It grew from three staff at founding to fifteen at Jackson's death, serving Fortune 500 corporate communications functions, national trade associations, universities, and community foundations from a converted farmhouse.

Jackson Jackson & Wagner ran on a specific operating premise: PR is a management function grounded in behavioral science, not a publicity function grounded in media relations. Every engagement began with formative research — surveys, focus groups, stakeholder mapping — before any tactical work. The premise put the firm in the same intellectual territory as John W. Hill's corporate PR model but pushed further into the academic behavioral-science literature that Grunig and Hunt would later formalize in Managing Public Relations.

The pr reporter Newsletter

Jackson co-founded and edited pr reporter, a weekly counseling-and-analysis newsletter, from 1958 through his death in 2001 — forty-three years at the masthead. The newsletter ran a different editorial premise from Denny Griswold's PR News: rather than trade movement and case histories, pr reporter ran counseling analysis. Each issue took a current business, political, or social event and analyzed it through the lens of stakeholder behavior, message resonance, and reputational risk. The intended reader was the senior counsel — the CCO of a Fortune 500, the managing partner of a firm, the PRSA senior member — who needed a weekly analytical framework for the current news cycle.

pr reporter achieved a paid subscriber base in the low thousands, concentrated in the C-suite of corporate communications functions. It ran a fixed section called "Purposeful Behavior Change" that Jackson wrote personally through most of the run. The section was the closest thing the field had to a weekly master class in behavioral-science-based counseling. The newsletter continued for two years after his death and closed in 2003.

The PRSA Code of Ethics

Jackson served as PRSA national president in 1980. In 1988 he chaired the committee that produced the revision of the PRSA Code of Ethics. The 1988 code — the version that governed the profession for twelve years — was largely his drafting. It established the professional standards of accuracy, disclosure, confidentiality, competition, and conflict-of-interest that PRSA members swear to on admission. Jackson participated again in the 2000 rewrite that produced the current code. He is the person most identified with the modern PRSA ethics framework.

The Patrick Jackson Award for Distinguished Service, established posthumously by PRSA, honors the practitioner who has most advanced the ethical standards of the field. It is one of PRSA's three top individual honors, alongside the Gold Anvil and the Paul M. Lund Public Service Award. Betsy Plank was the first recipient in 2001.

The Career

Jackson graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1955, worked briefly at a Boston agency, and opened Jackson Jackson & Wagner the following year. He built the firm through the 1960s and 1970s on New England corporate accounts — banks, insurance companies, universities, and the trade associations of the region's paper, textile, and technology industries. He expanded into national association work through the 1970s: American Cancer Society, National Association of Homebuilders, American Hospital Association.

He held every senior post PRSA offered: national president (1980), Counselors Academy chair, Assembly delegate, Educational Affairs chair. He lectured at Boston University, Northwestern's Medill School, and the University of New Hampshire for thirty years. He co-authored Public Relations Practices (Prentice Hall, six editions from 1970 through the 1990s), a graduate textbook. He mentored a generation of practitioners across the Northeast including several who succeeded him at PRSA leadership.

He died on April 30, 2001, in Epping, at age sixty-six, of complications from cancer. His wife and business partner Amber survived him.

The Legacy

The modern PRSA Code of Ethics is Jackson's. The behavioral-science-based counseling model — formative research, stakeholder mapping, purposeful behavior change — is his generation's most durable intellectual contribution to the field, and Jackson is its most-cited practitioner. The Patrick Jackson Award is one of PRSA's three top individual honors. Jackson Jackson & Wagner continues in Epping as an independent counseling firm, a working proof that senior public relations counsel does not require Manhattan overhead to succeed.

Every serious PR graduate program teaches the 1988 PRSA Code. Every serious counseling practice runs on the formative-research model Jackson built. Every serious senior counsel in the American Northeast trained under him or under someone he trained. He is the ethics architect of the profession's late-twentieth-century form.