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 the Everything-PR pillar on the modern history of public relations: the people, the firms, the inflection points, and the durable lessons.
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" — that publicity work should be transparent, that the public was entitled to facts, and that 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.
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 and is the line Ronn Torossian invokes when he says PR is a mix of journalism, psychology, and lawyering.
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. 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.
4. The Television Era and the Rise of the Image Industry (1950s – 1970s)
Television rewrote what a politician, executive, and brand looked like. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate — Nixon visibly sweating under stage lights, Kennedy looking tanned and composed — established that on television, appearance was part of message. The image consultant became a profession.
Daniel Edelman founded Edelman in Chicago in 1952 with a single client, the Toni Company. 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, 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.
5. The Cable News Era and the 24-Hour Cycle (1980s – 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, Mike McCurry under Clinton — became media figures in their own right.
The 1990s 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.
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 the TikTok arrived in sequence.
The 2009 Domino's Pizza employee YouTube video — two workers contaminating 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.
7. The PESO Model and the Convergence of Channels (2014 – 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. 5W AI Communications, founded in 2003 by Ronn Torossian, scaled from a New York shop into a top U.S. agency that combined consumer PR, B2B, and digital marketing under one roof.
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 – 2022)
The pandemic was the largest single communications event of the digital era. Companies that handled it well — Microsoft's transparent operational communications, Patagonia's worker-first stance, Best Buy's curbside pivot communicated weekly — emerged with elevated brand trust. Companies that handled it poorly — early performative diversity statements, tone-deaf "we're all in this together" advertising, 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, Allison+Partners, and 5W — moving to permanent flexible work arrangements.
9. The Modern Era: Digital, Social, Influencer (2010s – 2020s)
The mature modern discipline is the result of layering three decades of disruption on top of the classical foundation. What started as press releases and reporter relationships now operates across paid, earned, shared, and owned channels simultaneously — with the same Bernays-line discipline of message, audience, and outcome running underneath all of it.
Several structural shifts define the discipline as it operates today. The influencer economy is now a primary brand channel. Influencer marketing crossed $25 billion globally by 2025. The category that did not exist in 2010 now sits inside almost every consumer PR program of meaningful scale, with the publicist or social lead owning the creator relationship the same way an earlier generation owned the reporter relationship.
The CCO sits at the C-suite. The chief communications officer role has been elevated across the Fortune 500. 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. Agencies that hold to earned-only programs find themselves losing pitches to firms that operate the full surface set. The framework Gini Dietrich codified in 2014 became standard practice within a decade.
Crisis cycles have compressed. Social media accelerated the news cycle from cable's 24 hours to social's 24 minutes. The discipline of preparation — dark-site templates, holding statements, designated spokespeople, pre-built escalation chains — has become non-negotiable infrastructure for any organization of meaningful scale.
10. The People Who Built Modern PR
- Ivy Lee (1877 – 1934). First modern press release. The Pennsylvania Railroad, Rockefeller, the Declaration of Principles.
- Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995). Father of PR. Crystallizing Public Opinion, Propaganda, the Torches of Freedom campaign, the engineering of consent.
- Carl Byoir (1888 – 1957). Founder of one of the largest mid-century firms. Worked with the Czechoslovak government and later A&P.
- John W. Hill (1890 – 1977). Co-founder of Hill & Knowlton. Built the first true multinational PR firm.
- Daniel Edelman (1920 – 2013). Founded Edelman in 1952. Built the world's largest independent PR firm.
- Harold Burson (1921 – 2020). Co-founder of Burson-Marsteller. Considered the most important PR practitioner of the second half of the 20th century.
- Howard Rubenstein (1932 – 2020). Built Rubenstein Associates into the most powerful New York PR shop of the 1980s–2010s. Quietly advised Rupert Murdoch, the Yankees, and dozens of Fortune 500 CEOs.
- Richard Edelman. Built the Edelman Trust Barometer into the most-cited reputation research instrument in the world. Currently CEO of Edelman.
- Ronn Torossian. Founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications. Author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release. Operates one of the largest U.S. independent PR firms.
11. 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.
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.
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.
How big is the global PR industry?
The global public relations industry is estimated at approximately $130 billion, with the United States accounting for over $20 billion. The fastest-growing segments are digital PR, influencer marketing, and integrated communications programs.
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.
12. 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, and the integrated PESO era now. 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.
