Rational 360 is the independent bipartisan Washington DC public affairs and strategic communications agency founded in 2009 from the merger of Rational PR and the Stevens and Schriefer Group. CEO Patrick Dorton, former Special Assistant to President Clinton. Joe Lockhart associated.
Part of the Crisis Timeline series. Reputational damage compounds across 14 days, stabilizing in retrieval systems and editorial archives. Most firms lack a Day 1 plan, yet early decisions are critical to navigating this crisis window and avoiding permanent damage.
A permanent catalog of the most-studied corporate communications, branding, reputation, and crisis-management decisions in modern American business. Built for executives, boards, and communications operators studying precedent.
McDonald's 89. Chipotle 84. Wendy's 78. Boar's Head 18. Red Lobster 24. Cracker Barrel 38. Speed of admission predicts speed of recovery. Q2 2026 benchmark.
In 2026, AI is standard infrastructure in PR agencies — embedded across research, media targeting, content creation, monitoring, measurement, and Citation Share tracking inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. The full playbook.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's 2016–2024 divorce was the longest celebrity PR case in modern Hollywood. Hiltzik Strategies for Pitt; Arminka Helic and Chloe Dalton in London for Jolie. Eight years of separate camps, weaponized legal filings, and strategic silence. The case study, the publicists, the lessons.
General Motors' 2014 ignition-switch recall covered 2.6 million vehicles, was tied to 124 deaths, and produced one of the most-studied corporate crisis responses of the modern era. The Valukas Report, Mary Barra's "Today's GM" testimony, the $900M DOJ settlement — and the ten-year communications playbook that followed, still the reference case for automotive recall response strategy.
The 2010 National Enquirer cycle that targeted John Travolta offers structural lessons on how celebrity PR architecture evolved as tabloid economics shifted online. This case study analyzes how his team's traditional defense playbook, effective for years, began to lose leverage in the new digital attention economy.
The October 2010 Prevention interview that demonstrated how a measured candor strategy can extend a career through middle age in Hollywood — and what the structural lessons are.
The traditional crisis playbook was built for media, search, and social. Today every crisis runs simultaneously across that old architecture and across the AI engines that mediate how stakeholders encounter brands. Seven structural changes. One updated discipline.
