I laughed out loud, sardonically, when I received an email from PRSA asking me to take a survey. They also encouraged me to come back to the organization with a membership discount incentive.

At first I was going to ignore it. But I looked at the survey. True to form for this flailing organization, they asked the respondent to sign a statement that they would not share the contents or design of the survey.

So, transparency is still not a thing for a public relations organization that sells accreditation and promotes an ethics code that touts transparency as a professional value.

Let me be transparent. After decades of membership in this organization and service from the local to national levels, there is nothing that draws me back. The organization is professionally irrelevant, personally insulting, and ethically suspect.

They are professionally irrelevant because they offer programming that is fundamental. I have years of experience, a PhD, and am members of other organizations which feature high-level discussions led by veteran CCOs on a range of current topics from a management perspective. Meanwhile, PRSA’s very expensive annual conference features keynoters who are celebrities, not experienced public relations professionals. 

They also sell accreditation in public relations  (APR), which a member pays for to get study materials and take the exam, and then pays to maintain it every three years. It’s a nice revenue stream for the organization. But they do nothing to promote APR externally to hiring managers, CEOs and others who may favor a candidate with APR if they know what it is. I chaired the national committee on APR for several years and mentioned this to leadership and was rebuffed. My own research with two co-authors shows a tepid enthusiasm among members for accreditation, and those who do pursue APR say it is mostly for intrinsic value but there is little recognition from employers.

I also can share that PRSA is personally insulting. I ran twice for the national board and was told I was a “PR purist” and that I violated the diversity policy because I expressed publicly my biblical worldview on social issues. I blogged about this previously and I would point out again that their rejection of me for my faith is a violation of their own diversity policy, ethics code, civility statement and quite possibly the law. Many other veteran professionals—those with APR and membership in the College of Fellows—have expressed their own dismay at such toxic leadership and shared their own decision to leave the organization.

And this leads to the problem that PRSA leadership is ethically suspect. That’s actually an understatement. Mary Beth West, who challenged leadership and was met with gaslighting and multi-year undeserved defamation in response, has been recently showing the receipts via her “A Better PRSA” Facebook page on the attitudes of national leadership. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, she has legally obtained disturbing PRSA leadership email exchanges that show disparaging remarks about members (even some that sound excessively threatening and often are expletive-laden), clear discrimination toward members of faith (including faith-based universities seeking certifications or accreditations that PRSA helps control), an expressed disinterest in a Black woman for leadership, admissions of their own poor processes, favoritism for their own inner circles, and concern that people “will walk away” if they experience poor process and leadership. West has previously shared information that shows the organization has not been forthcoming with financial and membership numbers that would keep members from making fully informed decision about joining or renewing, another concept from its own ethics code.

Again, both West and I have heard from many, including veteran and accredited professionals, who have share our concern and have left or are considering leaving the organization. Unfortunately they don’t all speak publicly about this, somewhat because of intimidation by leadership and witnessing what happened to West. 

It saddens me that I have great respect and admiration for many PR professionals in my local chapter, including a large number of former students. I benefitted from PRSA when I was a younger professional. But I speak up because I am concerned that many at the local level don’t all realize the full truth of the toxic mess at the national level. 

So I don’t look at potential new programming or a minor financial discount as compelling and a reason for me to jump back on a sinking ship that would rather steer away than fix the holes. The holes include a lack of service to current members at the professional and student level. I see a declining membership and financial position (I’ve been told a $1.7 million deficit and 25% headquarters staff cuts were “acknowledged” in a memo to a limited few earlier this year). I see poor management and insidious bias. I see not only no reason to return, but relief that I left and am not wasting my time serving an organization that disrespects me.

I have not done much blogging recently. The last blog post I wrote on Penning Ink was way last May. There are reasons for that.

One, I was busy writing other things. As an academic I have always maintained a healthy research and publication agenda. These have been mostly academic journal articles and conference presentations. I could easily keep up regular blogging while doing that.

But in the past year and a half I had opportunities to take on larger publication projects. In addition to three journal articles that involved teams, which can be time consuming, I wrote a book and two book chapters. The book was something I proposed and wrote during a fall sabbatical in 2024. It was published last spring. My most recent blog post was about the publication of that book.

Meanwhile, my journal articles caught the attention of peer scholars working on books, and two of them reached out to me to invite me to write a chapter in books they were editing. So last year I submitted those, one having to do with measuring organizational reputation and another about public relations history. Both of these were submitted late last year and should be published in 2026.

Another life situation also slowed down my writing. Both of my elderly parents simultaneously started having significant health issues. There were trips to the hospital for various problems. The long story short is that my family had to make a sudden decision to move them from their independent senior living situation into a facility where they get the care they will now need. Anyone who has had to help their parents in this fashion knows the time demand for everything from physically moving to handling medical and legal paperwork. 

So now that my academic writing projects are complete and my parents are safely moved, I looked at the dawn of a new year and decided to reboot and rebrand for 2026. As a result, another blog I wrote for years called PierPoints blog will no longer have new posts. Instead, I am merging it with this PenningInk blog. PierPoints has always been the place where I posted my newspaper column  and other posts that were a variety of social commentaries. Penning Ink was where I wrote about public relations and communications. 

Penning Ink has long been the name of my freelance business, which has been about freelance journalism, to public relations consulting, and now is the imprint for my independent book publishing and my blog. You can find my professional and non-fiction books there, and soon I hope to add Christian fiction.

Going forward, the Penning Ink blog will have a broader focus on writing, communications, general commentary and Christian themes. 

If you have been a subscriber to Penning Ink, thank you. I hope you’ll continue to read what I have to offer, and I promise to offer more in the new year. 

It is a cliche among PR professionals that they need to have a “seat at the table.” By “table” we usually mean the conference table around which the management team sits. The top PR person or Chief Communication Officer (CCO) should be leading and making organizational decisions alongside their counterparts in marketing, finance, operations and others.

I have been interested in this “seat” being even better than the management table: the corporate board. I have recently published my own research on this, and now there is a report from a global consulting firm showing that CCOs are finally starting to be seen as having more value than outbound communication.   

 The research I recently published,  “PR capacity on corporate boards: claiming the CSR and ESG responsibility?” is online now and will be published soon in the Journal of Communication Management. 

The premise for my research is that if corporations, and their boards, have shown more concern for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ESG (environment, social, governance) metrics, then PR professionals or CCOs who focus on these things should be invited to give perspective and leadership on these subjects at the board level.

I looked at 25 companies on a list that ranked them high on ESG and CSR—the Fortune Modern Board 25—to see if they had board members with education or job titles in PR or communications. When I found few, I also looked to see if PR and communications pros were on the senior management team and advised the board or produced ESG, CSR, sustainability or diversity reports. Here I also found little management of these areas by PR and communication professionals. What I did find as a trend is more staff with degrees and titles specifically  in sustainability or diversity who manage these issues, potentially with collaboration of the CCO.

My sample was purposefully limited to companies who were ranked high on DEI, CSR, and ESG. So it is limited. So I was happy to read a report from global consulting firm Korn Ferry called “Chief Communications Officers: A New Face on the Board.”  

Korn Ferry looked not at specific issues like ESG but more broadly at reputation management. They found that more boards are leaning on CCOs to navigate business and cultural transformation, opening the path to the corporate boards that has been closed.

With corporate reputation accounting for as much as  25% of a company’s market value, more CCOs have risen to be trusted advisors to CEOs. Now these CCOs are advising and in some cases invited to join corporate boards.

The five areas where CCOs are being asked to advise boards include: talent development, change management, social impact, geopolitics, and risk management. All of these subjects come up in my undergraduate PR courses and my graduate course in communications management. Related terms like internal/employee relations, crisis communications, community relations and other terms associated with public relations and communication would indicate that this is the profession that is well suited to steer companies from the top—the board.

It’s early, but I am happy about this trend. I like a key quote from the KornFerry report that emphasizes that people in communications careers think differently than those in legal, finance or risk management. Exactly, and the different thinking is about balancing value for multiple stakeholders and ensuring transparent and two-way communication.

I and other educators and professionals in PR have been saying these for years. It’s heartening to see that some companies, all the way up to their boards, are hearing it now.