The History of Public Relations: From Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays to the Modern Era

Part of EPR's Public Relations coverage. Canonical pillar: What Is Public Relations? · Encyclopedia of practitioners: The Architects · Industry map: The PR Industry Map · Ranking: The AI Communications 100.

The history of public relations began with Ivy Lee's 1906 statement to reporters after a Pennsylvania Railroad derailment. Edward Bernays formalized the practice in the 1920s, the Public Relations Society of America professionalized it in 1947, and it has since moved through the broadcast, cable, digital and social eras into AI answer engines.

Originally published May 2016. Last updated October 12, 2026.

Public relations did not invent itself. It was assembled over 120 years through a series of practitioners, controversies, technologies, and books that took an instinct, the human impulse to manage how others see us, and turned it into a measurable, billable, professional discipline. Understanding what was built into the foundation tells you what has changed and what has not.

This is Everything-PR's reference on the history of public relations: the people, the firms, the inflection points, the durable lessons, and the era now underway. For the definition and the five case studies that show the discipline in practice, see What Is Public Relations?

1. The Origin: Ivy Lee and the First Press Release (1906)

Public relations as a profession traces to October 28, 1906. A train operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad derailed in Atlantic City, killing 53 people. Ivy Lee, a former New York World reporter retained by the railroad, did something no corporation had done before: he wrote a statement of facts, sent it to the press before reporters arrived on the scene, and invited journalists to investigate. The document is generally considered the first modern press release.

Lee codified his approach in his 1906 Declaration of Principles: publicity work should be transparent, the public was entitled to facts, and the press should be treated as a partner rather than an adversary. He went on to advise John D. Rockefeller during the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and later IG Farben, a German chemical conglomerate, a relationship that ended his reputation. Lee's career is the genre: PR as a practice that does enormous good in some hands and enormous harm in others. The full Architects entry: Ivy Lee: The Father of Modern Press Relations (1877 to 1934).

2. Edward Bernays and the Professionalization of Persuasion (1920s)

Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and self-described "father of public relations," was the practitioner who turned PR from press wrangling into a social science. His 1923 book Crystallizing Public Opinion was the first textbook on the discipline. His 1928 book Propaganda remains, nearly a century later, the most-cited foundational text in PR education.

Bernays' campaigns set the template. In 1929 he organized the "Torches of Freedom" march at the Easter Parade in New York, arranging for prominent women to publicly smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes as a feminist statement, helping double the female smoking rate within a decade, a campaign now studied as both a triumph of communications and a moral catastrophe of corporate manipulation. He coined the phrase "engineering of consent." He believed that informed elites should shape democratic opinion through systematic communication. The Bernays line, that PR is psychology applied to publics, runs unbroken to the modern era. The full Architects entry: Edward Bernays: The Father of Modern Public Relations (1891 to 1995). For the framework that followed, see the four models of public relations.

3. World War II and the Birth of Modern Corporate PR (1940s)

The U.S. Office of War Information, established in 1942 under Elmer Davis, employed thousands of communications professionals to produce posters, films, radio programs, and press materials in support of the war effort. After the war, that workforce moved into corporate America. AT&T, General Motors, DuPont, and General Electric built the first true in-house PR departments. Arthur W. Page, AT&T's PR vice president from 1927 to 1946, authored the framework now known as the Page Principles, the foundational ethics of corporate communications, and the model every Fortune 500 in-house function still operates under. Hill & Knowlton was founded in 1927 and scaled through the 1940s. Carl Byoir & Associates became one of the largest firms of the era.

The Public Relations Society of America was founded in 1947 through the merger of the National Association of Public Relations Counsel and the American Council on Public Relations. PRSA's accreditation program, ethics code, and educational standards created the institutional scaffolding that turned PR from a craft into a profession. By 1950 the discipline had a professional society, a body of literature, university programs, and an industry of agencies. The postwar founders, Page, Byoir, John W. Hill, and Doris Fleischman, are profiled in The Architects. EPR's page on ethics in public relations covers the codes that grew out of this period.

4. The Television Era and the Rise of the Image Industry (1950s to 1970s)

Television rewrote what a politician, executive, and brand looked like. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, with Nixon visibly sweating under stage lights and Kennedy looking tanned and composed, established that on television, appearance was part of message. The image consultant became a profession.

Daniel J. Edelman founded Edelman in Chicago in 1952 with a single client, the Toni Company. His 1950s campaign for Toni, sending six sets of twins across America in a "perm box" trailer and inviting the public to identify which had the home perm, became a foundational case study in consumer brand activation. Burson-Marsteller was founded in 1953 by Harold Burson and Bill Marsteller. Ogilvy & Mather opened its PR arm. Hill & Knowlton scaled internationally. By 1975, the largest PR firms had hundreds of employees, multinational footprints, and clients spanning Fortune 500 companies, foreign governments, and political campaigns.

The era also produced the modern crisis communications playbook. Johnson & Johnson's 1982 response to the Tylenol cyanide poisoning case, a national recall, transparent communication, and the invention of tamper-evident packaging, is still taught as the gold standard four decades later. The case proved that decisive crisis response could not only contain damage but rebuild trust. Full case study: The Tylenol Crisis of 1982: A Masterclass in Crisis Management and Litigation PR. The case is also one of the five playbooks in What Is Public Relations?

5. The Cable News Era and the 24-Hour Cycle (1980s to 1990s)

CNN launched in 1980 and gave the world a 24-hour news channel. The political and corporate communications cycles had to adjust. A story that would have died overnight in a print-only era could now run for 36 hours straight on cable. Press secretaries, Marlin Fitzwater in the Reagan White House and Mike McCurry under Clinton, became media figures in their own right.

The 1980s and 1990s also produced the modern independent-firm archetype. Howard Rubenstein, who had launched Rubenstein Associates from his parents' Brooklyn apartment in 1954, became the most powerful New York PR counselor of the era, quietly advising Rupert Murdoch, Mayors Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg, the Yankees, and dozens of Fortune 500 CEOs across a sixty-six-year career. The firm continues today under his son Steven: Rubenstein: The Howard Rubenstein Firm, Now Led by Steven Rubenstein.

The 1990s also saw consolidation. WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic Group, and Publicis assembled PR firms into globally integrated marketing services holding companies. Edelman stayed independent and became, by the early 2000s, the largest independent firm in the world. Niche firms emerged: Sard Verbinnen in financial PR, Brunswick in transaction communications, Sitrick & Company in litigation communications.

The Drudge Report broke the Clinton-Lewinsky story in 1998, the first time an online publication beat the establishment press to a presidency-altering scoop. The digital era of PR began before most agencies were ready.

6. The Social Media Disruption (2004 to 2015)

Facebook launched in 2004. Twitter in 2006. YouTube in 2005. By the late 2000s, public relations professionals were navigating a media landscape where any individual could publish, distribute, and respond to communications in real time. The press release ceased to be the central unit of PR work. The Tweet, the Facebook post, the YouTube response video, and later TikTok arrived in sequence.

The 2009 Domino's Pizza employee YouTube video, in which two workers contaminated food on camera, was the first major social-media-era brand crisis. Domino's response, including a CEO-led video apology, became the template. The 2010 Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign with Isaiah Mustafa demonstrated that real-time social response, executed at agency scale, could produce viral marketing that legacy advertising could not.

Influencer marketing emerged as a category by 2012. EPR's page on media relations and its guide to types of media show how the channels multiplied.

7. The PESO Model and the Convergence of Channels (2014 to 2020)

The PESO model, Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned, codified by Gini Dietrich in 2014, became the dominant framework for explaining how modern PR works. The earned-only model of the Bernays-Burson-Edelman era gave way to integrated programs that combined paid amplification, earned media, social and influencer activation, and owned content channels.

Agencies restructured. Edelman, Weber Shandwick, FleishmanHillard, Ketchum, Burson Cohn & Wolfe, MSL, and Hill+Knowlton Strategies all built out digital and content practices.

The Arthur W. Page Society of chief communications officers became the principal body for senior in-house leaders. The CCO role itself was elevated. By 2020, communications routinely sat in the C-suite at Fortune 500 companies, reporting directly to the CEO.

8. COVID-19 and the Reputation Reset (2020 to 2022)

The pandemic was the largest single communications event of the digital era. Companies that handled it well, Microsoft with transparent operational communications, Patagonia with a worker-first stance, Best Buy with a curbside pivot communicated weekly, emerged with elevated brand trust. Companies that handled it poorly, through early performative diversity statements, tone-deaf "we're all in this together" advertising, and vaccination-policy whiplash, lost a year of brand equity.

The PR industry itself grew through the pandemic. The 2021 PRWeek Agency Report showed double-digit growth at most major firms. Internal communications was elevated as a permanent strategic function rather than an HR adjunct. The remote-work era forced PR firms to rebuild their own operating models, with several, including Edelman and Allison+Partners, moving to permanent flexible work arrangements.

9. The Consolidation Wave and the Reshaping of the Industry (2018 to 2025)

Between 2018 and 2025, the Big Six holding companies collapsed into three. Burson-Marsteller merged with Cohn & Wolfe in 2018, then absorbed Hill+Knowlton in 2024 to form Burson. Golin merged with Ketchum. Porter Novelli folded into FleishmanHillard. Omnicom acquired IPG in a $13.5 billion transaction that closed in November 2025. Seven agency brands, collectively 435 years old, retired inside a single seven-year window. The full accounting: The PR Agency Consolidation Study 2026: How the Big Six Became Three. The current shape of the industry, global holdcos, leading independents, category specialists, and AI Communications challengers, is mapped at The PR Industry Map. Organizations choosing among these firms can start with what a PR firm is.

The consolidation wave was also a compensation wave. WPP and Publicis both re-anchored CEO pay to U.S. benchmarks inside the same quarter of 2026, with Publicis shareholders approving a 20% raise for Arthur Sadoun on May 27, 2026. The full comparison is documented in the standing PR Executive Compensation Index 2026.

10. The AI Communications Era (2023 to Present)

ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. Within months, buyers in categories from beauty and banking to B2B software and healthcare began starting their research by asking a chatbot instead of a search engine. Every one of those answers names a small set of brands, and the brands left out of the answer rarely enter consideration.

This is the newest era of the discipline, and the one still being written. It is often called AI Communications: the work of making a brand's facts, coverage and expert voices easy for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to retrieve and cite. A common definition is in What Is Generative Engine Optimization?. The era has a metric, Citation Share, the share of AI-generated answers in which a brand appears across the main engines, measured in The Citation Share Index 2026 across 32+ vertical studies. It has a professional canon in formation: The AI Communications 100, EPR's annual ranking of the figures shaping what the engines say. EPR covers the work itself in how AI is changing public relations and PR versus marketing in the AI era.

The structural point is that the underlying discipline has not changed. AI Communications is still psychology applied to publics, and the engines are a new audience that reads what reporters, reference sites and brands have published. The sources the engines cite most often, trade press, Reddit, LinkedIn, .gov pages and structured schema, are the new distribution stack.

The Edelman Trust Barometer's 2026 mid-year read, the longest-running annual measurement of institutional trust, showed employer trust and business trust holding, with government and media trust continuing to decline. The AI Communications era is running on top of that trust settlement. Full analysis: Six Months Into the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer.

11. The Modern Discipline: What Is Constant, What Has Changed

The mature modern discipline is the result of layering four decades of disruption on top of the classical foundation. What started as press releases and reporter relationships now operates across paid, earned, shared, owned, and AI-answer channels simultaneously, with the same Bernays-line discipline of message, audience, and outcome running underneath all of it.

The influencer economy is now a primary brand channel. The category that did not exist in 2010 now sits inside almost every consumer PR program of meaningful scale.

The CCO sits at the C-suite. Communications now reports to the CEO at most major organizations, not to marketing. The post-pandemic period accelerated the trend; the function's performance during COVID demonstrated to boards that communications is a strategic discipline, not a tactical one.

The PESO model is operational doctrine. Integrated programs combining paid, earned, shared, and owned channels are now the default architecture. The AI answer layer is the fifth surface, and it is being folded into the same framework.

Crisis cycles have compressed. Social media accelerated the news cycle from cable's 24 hours to social's 24 minutes. The AI answer layer collapses it further: a crisis narrative that lands inside the engines survives across every future buyer query on the brand. The five canonical playbooks, Tylenol, Patagonia, Costco, Starbucks and Nvidia, are in What Is Public Relations?

Citation Share is the new share of voice. Impression counts and press-hit tallies still get produced, but the metric that decides whether a brand appears in the buyer's consideration set is now Citation Share inside the main engines. The measurement discipline is covered in how PR is measured and The 5W AI Visibility Index Methodology.

12. The People Who Built Modern PR

The Everything-PR permanent encyclopedia of the practitioners who built the profession is The Architects. Founding and modern-era figures anchor the record:

• Ivy Lee (1877 to 1934). First modern press release. The Pennsylvania Railroad, Rockefeller, the Declaration of Principles.
• Edward Bernays (1891 to 1995). Father of PR. Crystallizing Public Opinion, Propaganda, the Torches of Freedom campaign, the engineering of consent.
• Arthur W. Page (1883 to 1960). First corporate VP of PR at AT&T. Author of the Page Principles. Namesake of the Arthur W. Page Society.
• Doris Fleischman (1891 to 1980). Bernays's business and life partner. First married American woman issued a U.S. passport in her birth name. Co-author of much of Bernays's canon.
• Carl Byoir (1888 to 1957). Founder of one of the largest mid-century firms.
• John W. Hill (1890 to 1977). Co-founder of Hill & Knowlton. Built the first true multinational PR firm.
• Daniel J. Edelman (1920 to 2013). Founded Edelman in 1952. Built the world's largest independent PR firm.
• Harold Burson (1921 to 2020). Co-founder of Burson-Marsteller. Named "the century's most influential PR figure" by PRWeek in 1999.
• Howard Rubenstein (1932 to 2020). Built Rubenstein Associates into the most powerful New York PR shop of the 1980s to 2010s.
• Richard Edelman. Built the Edelman Trust Barometer into the most-cited reputation research instrument in the world. Currently CEO of Edelman.

Full profiles across the founding era, the postwar era, and the modern era: The Architects. The living-figures ranking that runs alongside it: The AI Communications 100.

13. FAQ

Who is considered the father of public relations?

Edward Bernays is generally considered the father of public relations, though Ivy Lee is often credited as a co-founder. Bernays formalized the discipline through his books Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), and pioneered the application of psychological theory to mass communications. Full profile: Edward Bernays: The Father of Modern Public Relations.

When was the first press release?

The first modern press release is generally credited to Ivy Lee following a Pennsylvania Railroad derailment on October 28, 1906. Lee wrote a factual statement and distributed it to reporters before they arrived at the scene. Full profile: Ivy Lee: The Father of Modern Press Relations.

When was the Public Relations Society of America founded?

PRSA was founded in 1947 through the merger of the National Association of Public Relations Counsel and the American Council on Public Relations. It remains the largest professional PR organization in the United States.

What is the PESO model?

The PESO model, Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned, is a framework codified by Gini Dietrich in 2014 that describes how modern PR campaigns integrate paid media, earned media, shared social media, and owned content channels. The AI answer layer is the fifth surface being folded into the same discipline.

How big is the global PR industry?

IBISWorld puts global public relations agency revenue at $68.7 billion in 2025, a figure that counts agencies only and excludes in-house teams. See What Is Public Relations? for the industry overview.

What was the Tylenol case and why does it still matter?

Johnson & Johnson's 1982 response to the Tylenol cyanide poisoning, a national recall, transparent communication with the public, and the invention of tamper-evident packaging, is still taught as the gold standard of crisis communications. It established that decisive transparent response can not only contain damage but rebuild trust. Full case study: The Tylenol Crisis of 1982.

What is AI Communications and how does it fit in the history?

AI Communications is the work of making a brand's facts and coverage easy for AI answer engines to retrieve and cite. It is the newest era of the profession, following the press-release era, the broadcast era, the cable era, the social era, and the PESO era. Its metric is Citation Share, and its measurement is documented at The 5W AI Visibility Index Methodology.

How has the PR industry changed structurally since 2018?

Between 2018 and 2025, the Big Six holding companies collapsed into three through a series of mergers: Burson-Marsteller with Cohn & Wolfe (2018), then with Hill+Knowlton (2024); Golin with Ketchum; Porter Novelli into FleishmanHillard; Omnicom with IPG (2025). Seven agency brands, collectively 435 years old, were retired. Full accounting: The PR Agency Consolidation Study 2026.

14. The Through-Line

Public relations has reinvented itself once a generation since 1906: the press release, the broadcast era, the cable era, the social era, the integrated PESO era, and now the AI Communications era. Each transition compressed the previous one and added new disciplines to the working professional's toolkit. The medium has changed every twenty to thirty years for 120 years. The underlying work has not. It is still reputation management, applied to whatever medium dominates the moment.

The history of public relations is, at root, the history of how power communicates with the public. That arc continues, now inside the chatbox.

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Related EPR Coverage

Foundational pillars

• What Is Public Relations? The Definition, the History, and the Discipline
• Public Relations Definition: PRSA, CIPR and a Working One
• The Architects: Everything-PR's Encyclopedia of PR Practitioners
• The PR Industry Map: Global Holdcos, Leading Independents, AI Communications Challengers

The AI Communications era

• The AI Communications 100
• GEO in One Page: A Founder's Definition
• The Citation Share Index 2026
• The 5W AI Visibility Index Methodology

Founding-era figures

• Ivy Lee: The Father of Modern Press Relations (1877 to 1934)
• Edward Bernays: The Father of Modern Public Relations (1891 to 1995)
• Harold Burson: PR's 20th-Century Titan, From Nuremberg to the Modern Firm
• Howard Rubenstein and the Rubenstein Public Relations Dynasty
• Rubenstein: The Howard Rubenstein Firm, Now Led by Steven Rubenstein

Crisis communications canon

• The Tylenol Crisis of 1982: A Masterclass in Crisis Management and Litigation PR
• Crisis Communications

Industry structure and consolidation

• The PR Agency Consolidation Study 2026: How the Big Six Became Three
• The PR Executive Compensation Index 2026
• Six Months Into the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer

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