47 Outstanding Public Relations Thought Leaders in the USA

Introduction

If you are searching for the best public relations thought leaders in the USA, you already know the challenge. Every list looks the same. The same ten names appear on every roundup, the same agencies get cited in every trade publication, and the same frameworks get credited in every PR textbook. The people who dominate those lists have made genuine contributions to the profession.

But if you are looking beyond the familiar, or if you want to understand who is actually shaping how American communicators think and work in 2026, you need a different list.

Public relations in the United States is navigating one of the most consequential transitions in its history. Generative AI is restructuring earned media at a pace the profession has never experienced. Trust in institutions, media, and government is at generational lows. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that around six in ten respondents globally report a moderate to high sense of grievance toward government, business, and the wealthy, a mindset in which institutions are assumed to serve narrow interests until they prove otherwise.

At the same time, the commercial case for communications has never been stronger. The 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, drawing on nearly 2,000 global professionals, found that 73 percent of B2B decision-makers regard a company’s thought leadership as a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials or product sheets.

The United States remains the most consequential geography in the global PR profession. It is home to the world’s largest PR firms, the most influential professional associations, and a practitioner community whose debates and frameworks shape how communications is practised on every continent. What happens in American PR ripples outward. The voices on this list are the people making that happen.

The thought leaders compiled here were selected for the depth and breadth of their contribution to how the American PR and communications profession actually thinks. Some have built frameworks that practitioners around the country use every day. Some have documented and analysed the industry with rigour across decades. Some lead agencies that have set the standard for creative and strategic communications.

Some are educators and researchers whose work shapes how the next generation of American communicators is trained. All of them are actively contributing to the field’s evolution in 2026. Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every PR list, this directory brings together voices who genuinely deserve to be far better known.

The global PR services market is large and growing, with credible estimates placing it well above USD 100 billion, and American firms account for the largest share of that market.

For leadership teams and organisations that want support translating great communications thinking into practice, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with 10,000 copies sold globally and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams around the world to build the communication culture and team dynamics that make every communications strategy more effective.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Following the Right PR Voices Matters

The stakes of poor communications have never been higher. A single mishandled crisis, a gap between an organisation’s stated values and its documented actions, or a failure to communicate with clarity during a period of uncertainty can erase years of brand equity in days. Research from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that around six in ten respondents report a moderate to high sense of grievance toward institutions, so trust now has to be earned through consistent and explicit evidence of trustworthy behaviour rather than extended by default. The cost of getting communications wrong is not abstract.

It is measured in share price, customer churn, employee disengagement, and regulatory scrutiny.

The PR profession in the United States is simultaneously the world’s most mature and most disrupted. AI-generated content is flooding every media channel. The earned media model that underpinned American PR for decades is being restructured by search engines that increasingly answer questions directly rather than directing readers to articles. The boundary between PR, SEO, content marketing, and social media strategy has dissolved so completely that even professional associations struggle to define where their remit ends.

Following the right thought leaders is how practitioners stay ahead of shifts that matter rather than reacting to them after the fact.

Organisations whose leaders are visible, credible, and consistent in their communications generate measurable commercial advantage. Executive communications directly shape buying decisions, talent attraction, and investor confidence. Following the right voices is how communications professionals build the intellectual frameworks they need to create that kind of strategic value.

Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching 150+ countries, delivers keynotes and workshops that help leadership teams communicate with clarity. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, substantive contribution to how the American PR and communications profession thinks and operates, whether through published frameworks, original research, consistent and rigorous practitioner commentary, or demonstrated leadership of the profession’s most important organisations. Second, active engagement with the field in 2025 and 2026, through LinkedIn content, podcasting, writing, speaking, or professional association leadership. Third, genuine, current contribution to the specific disciplines they are associated with, not simply a historical reputation.

The list spans geography across the United States, from New York and Washington DC to California, the Midwest, the South, and New England. Disciplinary coverage includes crisis communications, PR measurement and evaluation, digital and social communications, agency leadership, B2B public relations, healthcare PR, technology PR, educator and researcher voices, independent practitioner perspectives, and professional community builders. The list brings together voices who genuinely deserve to be at the top of any directory of US PR thought leadership, rather than repeating the small set of names that circulate on every comparable compilation.

Category 1: The Framework Builders

These practitioners have done more than build careers in communications. They have built the intellectual infrastructure that the entire American PR profession operates on. Their frameworks, models, and conceptual contributions are used daily by practitioners across the country and beyond, often without the practitioners even realising whose thinking they are applying.

1. Gini Dietrich, Spin Sucks, Chicago, Illinois

The creator of the PESO Model and founder of Spin Sucks, Gini Dietrich has done more than almost any other American practitioner to give communications professionals a coherent architecture for integrated strategy. The PESO Model, which maps the interaction between Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media, is now taught in university communications programmes worldwide and used daily by tens of thousands of practitioners. In January 2026, Dietrich published her formal update to the framework, titled The PESO Model in 2026: Evolved, Operational, and Built for AI, addressing the realities of AI-driven discovery and zero-click search environments.

The PESO Model Certification, rebuilt entirely for 2026 in partnership with the S.I. Newhouse School for Public Communication at Syracuse University, is one of the most current and applicable professional credentials available to working communicators. Dietrich’s blog and podcast at Spin Sucks reach more than 100,000 subscribers, and she co-hosts The Agency Leadership Podcast alongside Chip Griffin. Her co-authored book Marketing in the Round, written with Geoff Livingston, remains a foundational text for integrated communications strategy.

2. Katie Paine, Paine Publishing, Durham, New Hampshire

Known as the Queen of Metrics by the communications profession, Katie Paine is the most widely recognised authority on PR and communications measurement in the United States. The founder of Paine Publishing, she has spent decades developing and championing frameworks that help practitioners distinguish between outputs, outcomes, and genuine impact, a distinction that most organisations still struggle to apply consistently. Her Measurement Advisor newsletter, speaking programme, and advisory work continued throughout 2025 and 2026, as AI disrupted traditional media monitoring and clients demanded clearer ROI.

Paine’s most enduring contribution is her insistence that measurement must connect to actual business results rather than media impressions or advertising value equivalency. Her frameworks for meaningful communications measurement have influenced the Barcelona Principles, the professional standards adopted by AMEC globally, and the measurement practices of organisations across sectors. In an era when communications professionals are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate the value of their work, Paine’s frameworks provide the clearest available pathway from activity to evidence.

3. Helio Fred Garcia, Logos Consulting Group, New York

President of Logos Consulting Group and author of The Power of Communication and Words on Fire, Helio Fred Garcia has written two of the most rigorous books ever published on crisis and leadership communication. A professor at NYU and Columbia, Garcia’s work on what makes communication in a crisis either accelerate or resolve a problem has been embedded in the training of communications leaders across government, military, and corporate sectors for decades. His frameworks on speed, transparency, and authenticity in crisis response remain foundational references for serious practitioners navigating complex situations in 2026.

Garcia’s particular contribution is his insistence on treating communications not as a craft or an art but as a discipline with identifiable principles that can be taught, learned, and applied under pressure. Words on Fire, published in 2020, extends his work to the era of social media acceleration and political polarisation, providing communicators with practical tools for high-stakes situations that earlier frameworks did not anticipate. His most recent book, The Trump Contagion, published in 2024, continues that work for the current political and media environment.

4. Johna Burke, AMEC, Scottsdale, Arizona

The Global Managing Director of AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, Johna Burke is the central figure in a multi-decade effort to professionalise how the PR and communications industry measures its work. The Barcelona Principles, which AMEC developed and has updated through multiple iterations, remain the most widely adopted framework for PR measurement globally. Burke has been relentless in pressing the profession to move beyond vanity metrics toward outcome-based measurement that connects communications activity to genuine business results.

Burke’s advocacy on measurement intersects powerfully with the pressure communications professionals face to demonstrate return on investment to senior leadership. Her work through AMEC’s Measurement Month and the annual AMEC Summit has built practitioner capability in measurement across more than fifty countries, creating a genuinely global professional infrastructure for a discipline the rest of the industry relies on but few organisations fund adequately. Based in the United States and operating globally, Burke remains one of the most practically influential voices in American PR thinking.

5. Mark Weiner, PublicRelay

Included here as a posthumous recognition of a career that left the PR measurement discipline permanently better than he found it, Mark Weiner passed away on December 10, 2023, after decades of contribution to how the American PR profession understands, applies, and argues for rigorous measurement. His book PR Technology, Data and Insights was named one of the top three PR books of 2022 by BookAuthority.

He served on the Arthur Page Society, was a Trustee of the Institute for Public Relations, and was the 2018 recipient of the Jack Felton Medal from the IPR for lifetime achievement in communications research. In his later career he served as Chief Insights Officer at PublicRelay, where his work on data intelligence reflected his longstanding conviction that communications professionals can only earn a genuine seat at the revenue table when they speak in the language of business outcomes.

Weiner’s argument that the PR profession’s credibility problem is fundamentally a measurement problem was a consistent and productive provocation in industry conversations for over a decade. His research on the ROI of public relations, demonstrating statistically measurable links between media coverage quality and financial performance, provided the profession with some of its most practically useful evidence for internal conversations about the strategic value of communications functions.

The measurement frameworks he championed during his career continue to shape how serious practitioners approach the challenge of demonstrating impact, and his influence on the Barcelona Principles and the broader culture of evidence-based PR practice has outlasted him in the best possible way. He belongs on any honest list of the voices that shaped American PR, and this directory would be less accurate without him.

Category 2: The Crisis and Reputation Specialists

These practitioners have built their professional identity around the highest-stakes corner of the communications discipline. Crisis communications is where PR earns its most consequential credibility, and these are the voices the American profession turns to when organisations are under genuine pressure. Their frameworks and practical wisdom are in demand precisely because the situations they address cannot wait for leisurely reflection.

6. Melissa Agnes, Crisis Ready Institute, New York

Founder and CEO of the Crisis Ready Institute and author of Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand in an Uncertain World, Melissa Agnes is the most practically cited voice on proactive crisis preparedness in the American PR profession. Her framework for building crisis-ready organisations became more widely deployed throughout 2025 and 2026 as AI-generated misinformation created new crisis scenarios, reputational attacks became faster and more technically sophisticated, and the political environment created new risks for brands that had taken public positions. The Crisis Ready podcast continued throughout the review period.

Agnes’s most distinctive contribution is her insistence that crisis preparedness is not an insurance policy but an ongoing operational discipline. Where most crisis frameworks focus on response, her Crisis Ready approach focuses on the organisational culture, decision-making infrastructure, and communication systems that determine whether an organisation survives a crisis with its reputation intact or is caught flat-footed at the moment it matters most. Her speaking work across corporate and government sectors has embedded this philosophy in organisations across North America and beyond.

7. Dini von Mueffling, DVMC, New York

Founder and CEO of Dini von Mueffling Communications, Dini von Mueffling is a crisis communications specialist who has been inducted into the Platinum PR Hall of Fame and recognised by PR News as one of the Top Women in PR. Her agency has won more than 32 Cannes Lions, including four golds. Von Mueffling specialises in public relations for individuals under intense public scrutiny, including landmark work helping Monica Lewinsky reclaim her public narrative. Her work sits at the intersection of reputation management, advocacy communications, and narrative strategy in high-stakes personal and institutional situations.

Von Mueffling has written and spoken extensively on the ethics of crisis communications, challenging the profession to distinguish between communications that protect legitimate interests and communications that obscure genuine wrongdoing. Her 2026 appearance at the PRWeek Crisis Comms Conference addressed the specific challenge of managing reputational crises in the deepfake and bot-amplification era, offering some of the most practically concrete guidance available on a challenge the profession is only beginning to understand systematically.

8. Kristi Piehl, Media Minefield, Minnesota

Founder and CEO of Media Minefield, Kristi Piehl focuses on equipping organisations for crises before they occur, working from the conviction that most organisations that suffer serious reputational damage do so because of a planning failure rather than a communications failure. She was one of the earliest and most consistent voices warning the PR profession about the crisis risk posed by deepfakes and AI-generated content. Her background as an Emmy Award-winning television journalist informs a practitioner’s instinct for how stories actually move through the media.

Piehl’s framework for proactive social media monitoring as a crisis early warning system, refined through work with clients across sectors, represents a practical contribution to the discipline that sits between reputation monitoring and crisis communications planning. Her approach treats crisis preparedness as an ongoing operational discipline rather than a response playbook, and her willingness to share the specific, practitioner-level detail of what that looks like in practice makes her content more immediately useful than much of the academic or consulting-firm commentary on the topic.

9. Judy Smith, Smith and Company, Washington DC

Founder and CEO of Smith and Company, the crisis communications firm whose work inspired the television series Scandal, Judy Smith is one of the most accomplished crisis communications practitioners alive, having advised heads of state, Fortune 500 CEOs, and public figures through some of the most complex reputational situations of the past three decades. Active throughout 2025 and 2026 as a speaker and advisor, her practical wisdom on what crisis communications actually requires, as distinct from what it looks like in theory, makes her the most experienced living practitioner of the discipline.

Smith’s contributions go beyond technical crisis management. Her work has consistently addressed the ethical dimensions of crisis communications, including the question of when protecting a client’s reputation serves the public interest and when it does not. Her career, built at the intersection of Washington DC politics, corporate crisis, and high-profile personal reputation management, gives her a perspective on the human and political dimensions of communications crises that practitioners with narrower backgrounds cannot replicate.

10. Molly McPherson, Independent

A crisis communications strategist and author of Indestructible: Reclaim Control and Respond with Confidence in a Media Crisis, published in 2021, Molly McPherson has built one of the most practically engaged audiences among American crisis communications practitioners through consistent, candid LinkedIn content on the realities of reputational risk in the social media era. Her particular focus is on how brands and individuals can build the kind of online presence that withstands reputational attacks, rather than simply responding to them after the damage is done.

McPherson’s commentary on crisis situations as they unfold in real time has built her a reputation for applying analytical frameworks to live examples in a way that is genuinely educational rather than simply reactive. Her work on the specific dynamics of social media crisis acceleration, including how quickly a single piece of content can move from obscurity to mainstream news, provides practitioners with tools for understanding and anticipating the mechanics of modern reputational risk in ways that traditional crisis frameworks developed before social media cannot fully address.

Category 3: The Agency Leaders and Business Builders

These practitioners have built successful agencies while simultaneously contributing to how the PR profession thinks about itself. They are not simply successful business operators. They are leaders who have shaped industry standards, advocated for professional development, and built organisations that have set benchmarks for creative and strategic communications. Their contribution to the profession extends well beyond their client work.

11. Jen Prosek, Prosek Partners, New York

Founder and CEO of Prosek Partners, one of the most respected financial and professional services PR firms in the world, and author of Army of Entrepreneurs, Jen Prosek has built one of the most distinctive agency cultures in American PR. Prosek Partners continued to win major clients and industry recognition throughout 2025 and 2026, and her public voice on building a firm culture that attracts and retains top communications talent, at a time when AI is restructuring what PR professionals actually do day-to-day, has made her a valuable voice for agency leaders navigating significant transition.

Army of Entrepreneurs articulates Prosek’s belief that the best agency cultures are built on giving every team member ownership over client outcomes rather than confining ownership to senior leadership. That philosophy has shaped how Prosek Partners operates and how its alumni build their own practitioner careers. Her sustained leadership of a significant independent financial communications agency, in a sector where most competitors have been absorbed into global networks, is itself a contribution to the diversity of the American PR agency landscape.

12. Jennifer Risi, The Sway Effect, New York

Founder and president of The Sway Effect, an independent communications consultancy launched after senior leadership roles at Ogilvy and WPP, Jennifer Risi has been a vocal advocate for the boutique agency model and for the senior-level access that clients often struggle to secure at large networks. Her influential essay in PRovoke Media in late 2025 argued that the wave of agency consolidation, including the Omnicom-Interpublic Group merger, would accelerate a flight of clients toward boutique independents, representing the greatest market share opportunity for independent agencies in a generation.

Risi’s commentary consistently cuts through the self-congratulatory tone that characterises much of the agency world’s public conversation. Her willingness to make concrete predictions about how industry consolidation will reshape client-agency relationships, and to put those predictions in print before the outcomes are known, reflects the kind of intellectual courage that distinguishes genuine thought leaders from practitioners who simply comment on trends after they have already become consensus. Her predictions for 2026 have been widely cited as among the most clear-eyed available.

13. Abbi Whitaker, The Abbi Agency, Reno, Nevada

Co-founder and President of The Abbi Agency, one of the most respected regional PR firms in the United States and a winner of multiple national awards, Abbi Whitaker is a vocal advocate for the human side of communications in an increasingly AI-mediated profession. Her work on what genuine community-building, local credibility, and relationship-first PR looks like in practice has offered a valuable counterpoint to the aggregation and automation trend reshaping the profession throughout 2025 and 2026.

Whitaker’s public voice on the sustainability of ethical, community-grounded PR practice has been important precisely because it comes from a practitioner who has built a thriving regional agency on those principles rather than arguing for them from a distance. The Abbi Agency’s success in Reno, Nevada, and its ability to attract national clients, demonstrates that relationship-first, community-grounded communications can be commercially viable at scale, not just a philosophy for smaller operations that cannot compete on AI-enabled content volume.

14. Curtis Sparrer, Bospar, San Francisco, California

Co-founder and principal of Bospar, one of the most distinctive boutique technology PR agencies in the United States, Curtis Sparrer helped build a firm that went fully distributed years before the pandemic made remote work standard. Bospar, founded in 2015, is known for its politely pushy approach to earned media and for a distributed model that places senior practitioners and former journalists in cities from San Francisco to New York. Sparrer’s public voice on what the agency model needs to look like to survive AI disruption, talent pressure, and client budget scrutiny has made him one of the more practically relevant agency leader voices in the American profession.

Sparrer’s own credibility is grounded in deep media relationships. He serves on the board of the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California, and as president of the San Francisco Press Club, which keeps him in regular contact with the journalists and editors his clients want to reach. His willingness to share the specific operational decisions behind Bospar’s distributed, technology-enabled model, rather than simply describing its results, provides genuine insight for agency leaders trying to build sustainable businesses in a rapidly changing market.

15. Chip Griffin, Small Agency Growth Alliance, New Hampshire

Founder of the Small Agency Growth Alliance (SAGA) and co-host of The Agency Leadership Podcast alongside Gini Dietrich, Chip Griffin focuses on the most underserved audience in the American PR profession: the agency owner. His practical, no-nonsense content on running profitable PR agencies, covering pricing, positioning, talent, client management, and building businesses that do not depend entirely on the founder’s personal effort, has made him one of the most practically used voices in the independent agency community throughout 2025 and 2026.

Griffin’s particular contribution is his willingness to discuss the business mechanics of running a PR agency with the same rigour and specificity that practitioners typically reserve for client strategy. Questions about pricing models, scope creep, the profitability of different service lines, and the founder transition from doer to leader are topics that most agency owners navigate in isolation. Griffin’s work builds a community of practice around those questions and gives independent agency owners the peer-level analysis and practical frameworks that large network agency employees receive through institutional training programmes.

Category 4: The Digital and Content Strategists

These practitioners built their reputations at the intersection of digital communications, content strategy, and public relations, and they have been consistently ahead of the curve on how platforms, technologies, and audience behaviours are changing what PR actually means. They are the practitioners most likely to have already solved the problem your organisation is only beginning to encounter, often because they have been wrestling with it for years before it became visible to the mainstream.

16. Frank Strong, Sword and the Script, Atlanta, Georgia

Founder of Sword and the Script Media, a content marketing and PR consultancy, Frank Strong is one of the most consistently data-driven and research-oriented voices in the American PR profession. His monthly roundup of original research relevant to communications professionals, drawing on academic journals, industry surveys, and trade publications, is a genuine service to the field. His analysis of media relations in an increasingly difficult pitch environment, including research on why pitching is harder than ever and what evidence suggests actually works, has been among the most cited practitioner content in the profession throughout 2025 and 2026.

Strong’s willingness to test assumptions with data rather than opinion, and to share findings regardless of whether they flatter the profession, makes him one of the most trusted independent voices available to PR practitioners. His research synthesis essay on the declining effectiveness of the press release as the default output of media relations work sparked a genuine professional debate and forced many practitioners to confront data they had been comfortable ignoring. His content is practically actionable in a way that most promotional agency commentary simply is not.

17. Scott Monty, Scott Monty Strategies, Independent

Scott Monty built his reputation as Ford Motor Company’s first global digital communications executive from 2008 to 2014, a period when corporate social media was genuinely uncharted territory. The Economist ranked him number one on its list of 25 Social Business Leaders, and Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally described him as a visionary. Since leaving Ford, Monty has operated an independent consultancy advising brands and agencies on executive communications, storytelling, digital strategy, and leadership communication culture. His newsletter, The Full Monty, is a fixture in the inboxes of communications professionals globally.

Monty’s 2025 essay on the difference between authentic leadership communication and performing the way a communicator thinks they should is widely cited as a precise diagnosis of why so much corporate content fails to land even when technically competent. His work increasingly focuses on the character-based dimensions of leadership communication, drawing on his humanities background and expertise in storytelling traditions far older than digital media, a perspective that provides a valuable counterweight to the technology-centric framing that dominates most digital communications discourse.

18. Lee Odden, TopRank Marketing, Minneapolis, Minnesota

CEO of TopRank Marketing and one of the most consistently useful voices at the intersection of content marketing, SEO, influencer marketing, and PR, Lee Odden has built a distinctive perspective on how AI is restructuring content discoverability and what that means for integrated communications. His research on B2B influencer marketing and its intersection with AI-driven search has been among the most practically cited work by communications professionals managing integrated programmes throughout 2025 and 2026. His Beyond B2B Marketing podcast continued throughout the review period.

Odden’s contribution is his ability to translate the technical dimensions of SEO and search behaviour into practical implications for communicators who approach content from an earned media rather than a paid search background. As the boundary between PR, content marketing, and SEO continues to dissolve in the AI era, practitioners who understand all three disciplines at a technical level are becoming more rather than less valuable, and Odden’s body of work provides one of the most comprehensive available maps of how these disciplines interact.

19. Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher, San Francisco, California

Founder of Silicon Valley Watcher and, in 2004, one of the first journalists to leave a major newspaper to blog full time, Tom Foremski is one of the most prescient and consistently relevant voices on how the technology industry uses and misuses communications. His writing on AI, corporate communications in Silicon Valley, and the ongoing restructuring of media has remained among the most independently useful perspectives for technology PR professionals throughout 2025 and 2026. His independence from both the agency world and the technology industry itself gives him a credibility that few others in the space possess.

Foremski’s most durable contribution to the profession is his documentation, over nearly two decades, of how Silicon Valley companies approach public relations as an instrument of competitive strategy rather than simply as a communications function. That documentation provides technology PR practitioners with historical context for current dynamics that most contemporary commentary treats as unprecedented, and his ongoing writing connects those historical patterns to the specific challenges of AI-era communications in ways that are genuinely illuminating.

20. Michelle Glogovac, The MLG Collective, California

Founder of The MLG Collective, a PR and podcast strategy agency, Michelle Glogovac is one of the most practically useful voices on the strategic use of podcasting as a PR tool. Her book How To Get on Podcasts is the most comprehensive practical guide available to communicators wanting to leverage the medium for earned media, thought leadership, and brand building. As podcast bookings as a PR tactic have grown substantially in recent years, with more than half of B2B marketers increasing investment in the channel, Glogovac’s work sits exactly at the intersection of traditional PR thinking and the media landscape modern practitioners need to navigate.

Glogovac’s argument that podcast appearances, structured and pitched correctly, represent a more durable form of earned media than traditional press coverage because they are searchable, long-form, and indexed permanently, has been influential in how progressive agencies position podcast strategy within integrated communications planning. She is consistently generous in sharing both what works and what fails in podcast PR, making her content practically actionable in a way that more promotional commentary from the agency world typically is not.

Category 5: The Measurement and Research Voices

These practitioners and academics have built their contribution primarily through the rigorous application of evidence, data, and research methodology to questions that the profession often approaches through intuition and tradition. They are the people who make the case that communications can be measured, that measurement can be meaningful, and that evidence-based practice is both possible and necessary. Their work is less visible than that of crisis communicators or digital strategists, but its influence on how the profession operates is deep and lasting.

21. Shonali Burke, Pennsylvania

One of the most respected voices on PR measurement, business outcomes, and the gap between vanity metrics and genuine communications impact, Shonali Burke has built her professional reputation on a single sustained argument: that communications professionals can and must connect their work to business results rather than media coverage counts. The founder of the #measurePR community and an IABC-accredited communicator, she teaches at Johns Hopkins University and was inducted into the PRSA National Capital Chapter Hall of Fame in 2025. Her rigour on measurement makes her one of the most important practical educators in the American PR field.

Burke’s frameworks for connecting PR to business results have only become more urgent as AI challenges the entire earned media model and clients demand more evidence of ROI. Her enduring contribution is the argument that measurement is not a reporting exercise but a strategic capability, and that practitioners who develop genuine measurement competency gain a qualitatively different kind of credibility with senior leadership than those who rely on impression counts and coverage volume.

22. Dr. Tina McCorkindale, Institute for Public Relations, Florida

President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations, Dr. Tina McCorkindale brings more than twenty years of academic teaching experience and more than a decade in corporate communication and analytics to her leadership of one of the most important research organisations in the American PR profession. She was inducted into the PR News Measurement Hall of Fame in 2018, received the PRSA David Ferguson Award in 2017, and has served on the boards of the Arthur Page Society, the AMEC Academic Advisory Board, and the ICCO Board of Management.

McCorkindale’s contribution at the IPR is to bridge the gap between academic research and practitioner application, producing and commissioning research that is both methodologically rigorous and practically useful to working communications professionals. Her work on AI in communications, on the measurement of communications effectiveness, and on the ethics of emerging communications technologies has given the profession a consistent source of evidence-based guidance at a moment when the pace of change makes that guidance more valuable than ever.

23. Shannon Bowen, University of South Carolina

An award-winning scholar and researcher at the University of South Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Shannon Bowen teaches and researches ethics across corporations, pharmaceutical firms, governmental entities, and the public relations industry. An elected member of the Board of Trustees of the Arthur W. Page Society and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Public Relations Research Conference, Bowen is one of the most influential academic voices on PR ethics in the United States.

Bowen’s research on the ethical dimensions of public relations, including how organisations navigate conflicts between client interests and public interest, how AI introduces new ethical challenges for communications professionals, and how the field develops and enforces professional ethics standards, has been published in leading academic journals and presented at international conferences. Her combination of classroom teaching and active research engagement makes her one of the most productive bridges between PR scholarship and professional practice in the American university system.

24. Adrienne Wallace, Grand Valley State University, Michigan

Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Public Relations Education and an associate professor at Grand Valley State University, Adrienne Wallace has built her contribution to the profession through a sustained commitment to how PR is taught and researched in American universities. Named a 2025 Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year, she serves as research committee co-chair of the Commission on Public Relations Education and is a past president of the West Michigan chapter of PRSA. The Journal of Public Relations Education, which she edits, is the primary publication connecting PR educators across the country and internationally, making her one of the most influential figures in shaping how the next generation of American communicators is trained.

Wallace’s scholarly work on digital and social media communications in educational contexts reflects her commitment to ensuring that PR education keeps pace with the rapidly changing practice environment. Her editorial leadership of the JPRE has created a platform for practitioner-researcher collaboration that benefits both communities, and her active involvement in professional bodies demonstrates the kind of integration between scholarship and practice that PR education consistently aspires to and rarely achieves.

Category 6: The Community Builders and Independent Voices

These practitioners have built their professional identity not within large agencies or institutions but through independent practice and deliberate community building. They are the voices that thousands of practitioners rely on for honest, unmediated perspectives on what the profession actually looks like from the inside, and they are the people who have built the peer learning spaces that sustain many practitioners through the isolation of freelance and independent work.

25. Michelle Garrett, Independent B2B PR Consultant, Ohio

B2B PR consultant, writer, and community builder, Michelle Garrett is one of the most genuinely useful voices for working PR professionals in the United States. Her book B2B PR That Gets Results is an Amazon best seller that provides the most practically focused treatment available of public relations for companies selling to other businesses, a discipline with its own specific dynamics that most PR books address only tangentially. Her #FreelanceChat community, which she founded in 2018 and which now runs on YouTube, is one of the most active peer learning spaces for independent communications professionals.

Garrett’s content is characterised by the kind of practical specificity that comes from working with real clients every day rather than advising from a distance. Her willingness to push back on received wisdom, including wisdom endorsed by organisations much larger and better-resourced than her own consultancy, reflects an intellectual independence that distinguishes the best practitioner voices from those who simply validate industry consensus. Her readiness to challenge assumptions about the universal superiority of data-driven measurement over relationship-based media engagement has sparked productive debate in the practitioner community.

26. Tonya McKenzie, Sand and Shores, California

Founder of Sand and Shores PR, a reputation management and crisis communications agency, and a podcaster, author, and speaker, Tonya McKenzie consistently shares honest and difficult truths about how and why PR relationships succeed and fail. Her candid practitioner-client dynamic commentary, including her willingness to discuss the failure modes of PR relationships, is genuinely educational for practitioners and clients alike. Her focus on reputation management for individuals and brands navigating public scrutiny gives her a perspective on the human dimensions of communications that is frequently missing from more technical commentators.

McKenzie’s widely shared commentary on the difference between PR for the brand and PR for the person behind the brand has influenced how many practitioners approach executive positioning and personal reputation strategy for senior leaders who are inseparable from their organisations’ public identities. Her willingness to discuss the times when client behaviour makes good PR work impossible, a topic that most practitioners avoid publicly, provides the kind of honest practitioner insight that helps newer professionals build realistic expectations about the work.

27. Bill Byrne, Remedy PR, Texas

Co-founder of Remedy PR and creator of The Byrne Notice, Bill Byrne has built a reputation for unfiltered, honest commentary on the state of communications and PR practice. His content tackles the gap between how the profession presents itself and what it actually looks like from the inside, and his willingness to name specific dysfunction, including the corporate communications habits that waste time and obscure meaning, has built a loyal following among practitioners who find most industry commentary too promotional to be genuinely useful.

Byrne’s particular contribution is applying the communications expertise the profession teaches to the profession’s own internal communications, identifying with specificity the ways that communications teams fail to communicate effectively with their own organisations and leadership. His content on clarity, specificity, and the discipline of saying what you mean without hedging or jargon is as relevant to practitioners working on their own executive communications culture as it is to their external client work.

28. Kami Huyse, Zoetica Media, Texas

Founder of Zoetica Media and one of the most experienced voices on social media strategy and community building in the American PR profession, Kami Huyse has been a consistent voice on how practitioners can build genuine communities around their organisations rather than simply accumulating social media followers. Her LinkedIn content throughout 2025 and 2026 addressed the growing challenge of sustaining authentic community engagement in an environment where AI-generated content is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine practitioner voices from automated output.

Huyse’s particular contribution is her long-term perspective on what has and has not changed in digital communications. Having been active in social media strategy since the early years of the profession’s engagement with these platforms, she brings a historical perspective on each successive wave of platform change that helps practitioners distinguish between genuinely structural shifts and temporary fluctuations. Her community-building focus provides a counterbalance to the content-volume orientation that dominates most social media strategy advice.

29. Ron Culp, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

PR consultant, educator, and professional mentor at DePaul University in Chicago, Ron Culp is one of the most consistently generous contributors to the development of early-career communications professionals in the United States. His blog Culpwrit and his active LinkedIn presence focus on the fundamentals of professional practice, career development, and the ethical dimensions of communications work. His willingness to share lessons from a long career in senior communications roles, including the mistakes and the things he would do differently, provides a kind of professional wisdom that formal education rarely transmits.

Culp’s contribution to the profession is as much mentorship as content creation. His sustained engagement with students, early-career practitioners, and communications educators across the country has created a network of professionals who carry his emphasis on ethical practice, clear writing, and genuine relationship-building into organisations across every sector. In an era when much professional content is produced for marketing rather than education, Culp’s commitment to genuine practitioner development is both distinctive and valuable.

Category 7: The Measurement and Technology Bridge Builders

These practitioners sit at the intersection of communications strategy and the technologies that are transforming how PR is measured, discovered, and evaluated. They are the people helping the profession understand not just that AI is changing everything, but specifically which dimensions of practice are changing, how they are changing, and what practitioners can do to respond effectively. Their contribution is translating technical complexity into practical implications.

30. Sarah Evans, Zen Media, Texas

Partner and Head of PR at Zen Media, Sarah Evans has been at the forefront of merging earned media strategy with the proprietary frameworks she has built for the AI era, including Reputation+ and her Answer Visibility Operating System, which focus on positioning a brand so thoroughly across earned, owned, and shared media that it becomes a default citation for AI systems and search engines. With more than two decades of experience guiding companies through funding rounds, product launches, crises, and AI-driven reinvention, Evans has developed a distinctive perspective on where PR and SEO are converging in the AI era. Her commentary on Answer Engine Optimisation and its implications for PR strategy is among the most practically actionable available.

Evans contributed to the development of Zen Media’s proprietary framework for measuring PR’s contribution to organic search authority, which has become a model for how progressive agencies demonstrate the long-term SEO value of earned media coverage in terms that resonate with CMOs and CFOs. As AI-driven search continues to restructure how audiences discover information, her work on how PR professionals can optimise for AI citation rather than simply for human search behaviour represents the leading edge of the profession’s engagement with this challenge.

31. Holly Pavlika, Inmar Intelligence, Jersey City, New Jersey

Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Inmar Intelligence, Holly Pavlika is one of the most active and respected voices on influencer marketing, content strategy, and the measurable business impact of PR programmes in the United States. Her work on how brands can build authentic communities, how influencer marketing can demonstrate genuine business value, and how AI is restructuring content strategy has made her one of the most practically useful voices in the American PR profession throughout 2025 and 2026.

Pavlika’s particular contribution is her insistence on connecting influencer and content strategy to measurable business outcomes rather than to engagement metrics that may have little relationship to commercial value. Her work at Inmar Intelligence, which uses data and technology to help brands demonstrate the commercial impact of their marketing and communications investments, has given her access to evidence about what actually drives behaviour change that few purely agency-side practitioners possess.

32. Jason Falls, Louisville, Kentucky

Author of Winfluence: Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand and host of the Winfluence podcast, Jason Falls is one of the most analytically rigorous voices at the intersection of influencer marketing, social media, and PR strategy. He has held senior roles including senior influence strategist at the advertising agency Cornett and executive vice president of marketing at CIPIO.ai, and he advises brands independently. His direct, no-nonsense engagement with practitioners as intelligent adults capable of handling complexity has built him a substantial following, and his content on how AI is restructuring influencer selection, measurement, and authenticity has been among the most practically cited work in the PR community throughout 2025 and 2026.

Falls’s most consistent contribution is his refusal to treat influencer marketing as either a magic solution or a cynical manipulation, instead approaching it as a communications discipline with identifiable principles, measurable outcomes, and genuine strategic value when done well. His analysis of what distinguishes high-performing influencer partnerships from vanity arrangements has helped practitioners build measurement frameworks that survive client scrutiny, a contribution that is more practically significant than it sounds.

33. Deirdre Breakenridge, Pure Performance Communications, New Jersey

CEO of Pure Performance Communications, seven-time published author, creator of eight LinkedIn Learning courses on PR and marketing with millions of views, and host of Women Worldwide, a podcast approaching two million downloads featuring women leaders sharing career insights globally, Deirdre Breakenridge is one of the most prolific and educationally committed voices in the American PR profession. A thirty-plus-year veteran who has counselled senior executives at organisations including Nasdaq and the NBA, her work reaches PR professionals from their first job to the C-suite.

Breakenridge’s co-authored book with Brian Solis, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, was ahead of its time in arguing that social media required PR to fundamentally rebuild around two-way conversation rather than broadcast messaging. Her most recent book Answers for Modern Communicators provides a comprehensive treatment of strategic business communication for an audience that cannot rely on traditional PR playbooks. Her consistent advocacy for emotional intelligence as a core PR competency has influenced how many training programmes approach the development of early-career communicators.

Category 8: The Agency Leadership and Diversity Champions

These practitioners have built their professional contributions at the intersection of agency leadership, professional development, and the sustained effort to make the American PR profession more diverse, inclusive, and representative of the audiences it serves. Their work shapes not just communications strategy but the culture and composition of the profession itself, addressing a gap between the demographic composition of PR workforces and the communities that organisations communicate with.

34. Carreen Winters, MikeWorldWide, New York

Chief Strategy Officer at MikeWorldWide and a Trustee of the Institute for Public Relations, Carreen Winters is one of the most respected strategic communications minds in the corporate reputation and crisis space in the United States. Her work on the intersection of corporate reputation, purpose, and strategic communications, and how AI changes the reputational risks and opportunities organisations face, has continued to make her one of the most valued senior voices in the profession. She is the architect of several of MikeWorldWide’s core methodologies, including its CorpSumer approach to integrated corporate and brand reputation.

Winters’ contribution to the profession extends beyond her client work to her advocacy for communications leadership that is genuinely strategic. Her research and writing on the growing expectation that communications leaders will contribute directly to business strategy rather than simply executing against it reflects one of the most important ongoing conversations in the field, and her practical experience navigating that evolution in senior roles at a major agency gives her perspective a credibility that advisory voices without that experience cannot match.

35. Adrienne Sheares, ViviMae Labs, Washington DC

Founder of ViviMae Labs and one of the most practically useful voices on community-led communications strategy and the intersection of PR, social media, and genuine audience relationship-building, Adrienne Sheares has developed a coherent strategic response to the AI-driven disruption of traditional earned media throughout 2025 and 2026. Her work on building communities that generate earned media organically, rather than pitching for coverage that increasingly does not convert into traffic, addresses one of the most consequential structural challenges facing the American PR profession.

Sheares’ approach to community-led communications draws on principles from community organising, digital anthropology, and brand strategy in ways that help practitioners move beyond the transactional media relations model that has dominated PR for decades. Her growing LinkedIn presence and substantial engagement from practitioners in the review period reflect the quality and relevance of her thinking to communicators who are actively wrestling with the challenge of building audience relationships in an AI-mediated information environment.

36. Peter Himler, Flatiron Communications, New York

Founding Principal of Flatiron Communications and one of the most experienced and credible media relations practitioners in New York, Peter Himler has spent more than four decades building relationships with journalists that give his perspective on what media actually values in 2026 a credibility that few digital-native voices can match. His writing and speaking on the state of American journalism, what it means for earned media, and how AI is reshaping the journalist-PR practitioner relationship has been among the most practically honest and historically grounded content available to the profession.

Himler’s direct experience working with journalists over four decades gives his assessments of what media relations looks like in 2026, including what has genuinely changed and what practitioners mistake for change when it is actually continuity, a depth of context that practitioners who entered the profession after social media became dominant simply cannot replicate. His willingness to name specifically what journalists find annoying, what they find useful, and what has shifted in their relationship with PR professionals, is the kind of honest practitioner wisdom that benefits everyone in the profession.

37. Mark Schaefer, Schaefer Marketing Solutions, Knoxville, Tennessee

Author of Marketing Rebellion, Belonging to the Brand, and Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World, Mark Schaefer is one of the most prolific and practically useful voices at the intersection of marketing, PR, and the AI transition. Through his firm Schaefer Marketing Solutions, his Marketing Companion podcast, and his {grow} blog, which is among the most widely read marketing blogs in the world, he has become one of the most followed voices in the broader marketing and communications community. His work on human-led brand authority in an age of AI-generated content has been widely shared among communications professionals throughout 2025 and 2026.

Schaefer’s particular contribution is his insistence that human connection, belonging, and authentic community remain the most durable sources of brand value even as AI generates content at volumes that would have been unimaginable five years ago. His argument in Audacious that human creativity, empathy, and genuine audience understanding are competitive advantages precisely because AI cannot replicate them provides communicators with a framework for positioning their own value in organisations that are questioning the role of human-led communications in an AI era.

Category 9: The Journalism and Industry Analysis Voices

These practitioners and journalists provide the analytical infrastructure that the American PR profession uses to understand itself. They are the people documenting, analysing, and interpreting what the PR industry is doing, how it is changing, and what the consequences of those changes are. Their contribution is less visible than that of practitioners who work directly with clients, but it is essential to the profession’s capacity for honest self-assessment.

38. Paul Holmes, PRovoke Media, New York

Founder and chair of PRovoke Media, formerly the Holmes Report, Paul Holmes has spent close to four decades building the most comprehensive journalistic and analytical coverage of the global PR and communications industry, with its strongest roots in the United States. PRovoke’s Global PR Agency Rankings, the SABRE Awards, the Global PR Summit, and the annual Influence 100 compendium of key industry figures have become the industry’s most trusted benchmarks for quality and performance. Holmes’ own commentary on the business and practice of PR is consistently well-informed and appropriately critical of the profession’s tendencies toward self-congratulation.

Holmes’ 2025 essay arguing that the Omnicom-IPG merger represented not just a business consolidation but an existential challenge to the independent thought leadership and creative distinctiveness of the agencies being absorbed was one of the year’s most debated pieces of industry analysis. His decades of sustained, rigorous coverage of the profession from a journalistic perspective, rather than a promotional or self-interested one, represents a contribution to the field’s intellectual health that is difficult to overstate.

39. Rani Molla, Sherwood News, New York

Senior tech correspondent at Sherwood News and an alumna of Vox, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal, Rani Molla is one of the most rigorously data-driven journalists covering the intersection of technology, media, and communications that PR professionals must understand. Her journalism throughout 2025 and 2026 on how AI is restructuring media consumption, advertising, and the reach of earned media was among the most practically consequential content for communications professionals trying to understand the environment they work in. She is the journalist most worth following if you work in corporate communications and want to understand what is happening to the media landscape.

Molla’s journalism is distinguished by her insistence on quantitative evidence for claims about media behaviour that many commentators make on the basis of anecdote and intuition. Her data-driven approach to documenting how audiences actually consume media, what they trust, and what they ignore provides PR practitioners with a factual foundation for strategic decisions that the profession’s own research often struggles to provide at the same level of rigour and specificity.

40. Mark Ragan, Ragan Communications, Chicago, Illinois

Owner and chairman of Ragan Communications, one of the most important providers of PR and corporate communications professional development, media, and events in the United States, Mark Ragan has built a platform that serves practitioners across the full range of career stages and disciplinary specialisations. Ragan’s publications, including PR Daily, and its conferences on PR, internal communications, and communications leadership, provide the professional infrastructure that tens of thousands of American communicators rely on for continuing education and peer connection.

Ragan’s personal contribution, beyond building the Ragan Communications platform, is his consistent advocacy for communications professionals to be taken seriously as strategic business contributors rather than tactical executors. His editorial commentary and public statements on the value of the communications function, and on what organisations lose when they treat communications as a cost centre rather than a strategic asset, have been consistent themes throughout the period of his leadership of the company.

Category 10: The Reputation and Trust Practitioners

These practitioners have built their professional identity around the most fundamental question in communications: how organisations and individuals build, maintain, and repair trust with the audiences that matter most to them. Their work addresses the deepest layer of what public relations actually does, and their frameworks have become essential references for organisations navigating a trust environment that has become more complex and more consequential than at any previous point in the profession’s history.

41. Richard Edelman, Edelman, New York

President and CEO of Edelman, the world’s largest independent PR firm by revenue, Richard Edelman has built the annual Edelman Trust Barometer into the most cited and widely used research instrument in the entire communications industry. The 2025 and 2026 Trust Barometer reports, measuring trust in institutions, business, government, media, and NGOs across 28 countries, set the agenda for corporate communications globally throughout the review period. His public positioning on what AI means for trust, and for the earned media industry, made him one of the most consequential individual voices in the profession.

Edelman’s framing of the 2025 Trust Barometer’s central finding, that economic fears have hardened into a widespread sense of grievance, with around six in ten respondents reporting a moderate to high sense of grievance toward government, business, and the wealthy, has reshaped how many American communicators think about audience segmentation and message targeting. His sustained, decades-long investment in producing and publishing the Trust Barometer as a public good rather than a proprietary asset represents a contribution to the field’s intellectual commons that few individual leaders can match.

42. Barri Rafferty, Anywhere Real Estate, New York

Former President and CEO of Ketchum, one of the first women to lead a global PR firm, and now Chief Communications Officer and Head of Public Affairs at Anywhere Real Estate, Barri Rafferty remains one of the most senior and widely respected communications leaders in the American profession. Her public voice on the future of communications agencies, on what AI means for agency models, and on the talent and measurement challenges the industry faces draws on decades of senior leadership experience that few current commentators possess. Since leaving Ketchum she has also led communications at Wells Fargo and served as CEO, Americas at the stakeholder advisory firm Sodali and Co.

Rafferty’s most valuable contribution is her willingness to speak with frankness about where the agency business is heading, what kinds of firms will thrive and which will struggle as consolidation and AI reshape the market, and what communications leadership genuinely requires in the current environment. That assessment is informed by experience building and leading one of the world’s largest PR agencies and carries a credibility that observers without that background cannot replicate.

43. Sandra Fathi, Gregory FCA, New York

Founder of Affect, a communications agency with deep specialisation in technology and healthcare PR that was acquired by Gregory FCA in 2021, Sandra Fathi now serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Gregory FCA. A long-time contributor to the professional development of the field through her work with PRSA, including roles as President of PRSA-NY and chair of PRSA’s Tri-State District, she is a recognised voice on media relations and measurement. Her commentary on media relations strategy in a world where journalists receive hundreds of pitches per day and trust in media is declining has been consistently useful to practitioners across the profession.

Fathi has long argued that pitch relevance and the quality of evidence offered to journalists matter more than pitch length in determining response rates, a position that runs counter to the received wisdom that shorter pitches always perform better. Her willingness to test assumptions rather than simply repeat professional orthodoxy, and her sustained advocacy for measurement, are characteristic of her contribution to the field.

44. Sabrina Horn, HORN Strategy, San Francisco, California

Founder and CEO of HORN Strategy and author of Make It, Don’t Fake It: Leading with Authenticity for Real Business Success, Sabrina Horn has built a distinctive framework for authentic leadership communication drawn from a career advising executives through intense public scrutiny. Her argument that authenticity in leadership communications is not a soft concept but a measurable and achievable operational standard has influenced how many Chief Communications Officers and Chief People Officers approach executive coaching and spokesperson preparation.

Horn’s framework for distinguishing between authentic communication and comfortable communication, arguing that authentic communication is frequently uncomfortable precisely because it requires leaders to say true things that create short-term friction, has been influential in how communications coaches work with executives on spokesperson preparation. Her background building one of the first technology PR agencies in Silicon Valley and advising technology companies through periods of intense public scrutiny gives her practical experience that makes her conceptual frameworks more credible and more actionable than those built purely on research.

Category 11: The Next Generation Voices

These practitioners represent the generation of American PR professionals who are actively redefining what the profession looks like. They bring fresh perspectives shaped by digital nativity, by the collapse of the boundary between PR and other marketing disciplines, and by a career context in which the tools and channels of communications have changed dramatically since they entered the field. Their contribution is not simply that they are young, but that they are building practice frameworks that are native to the current communications environment rather than adapted from an older one.

45. Gerry Rodriguez, Edelman, New York

Executive Vice President and US Head of Brand Purpose and Impact at Edelman, Gerry Rodriguez was named to PRWeek’s 40 Under 40 class of 2025, one of the profession’s most competitive recognitions of emerging excellence. His work at Edelman on brand purpose, social impact communications, and the integration of purpose into business strategy reflects one of the most important dynamics reshaping American corporate communications in the current period. His perspective on how brands can communicate about purpose in a way that withstands genuine scrutiny, rather than simply performing purpose without the underlying substance, is particularly valuable.

Rodriguez’s positioning at the intersection of purpose communications and business strategy at the world’s largest PR firm gives him visibility into how the most sophisticated American corporate communicators are navigating the challenge of purpose authenticity in a period when audiences are more sceptical of purpose claims and more capable of investigating their basis. His active LinkedIn presence throughout 2025 and 2026 has translated those institutional insights into practically useful content for communicators in smaller organisations navigating the same challenge with fewer resources.

46. JJ Colao, Haymaker Group, New York

Founder of Haymaker Group and a member of PRWeek’s 40 Under 40 class of 2025, JJ Colao has built a communications agency with a distinctive approach to the intersection of media relations, narrative strategy, and business development for growth-stage companies. His perspective on how startups and scale-ups communicate their stories during periods of rapid change, when the gap between what a company is doing and what external audiences understand it to be doing is often largest, addresses a practical challenge that a growing proportion of American PR practitioners face.

Colao’s work at Haymaker Group reflects the generation of PR practitioners who entered the profession after the collapse of the distinction between earned, owned, and paid media, and who therefore approach integrated communications as the natural baseline rather than as an advanced capability. His LinkedIn content throughout the review period demonstrated a rigorous, evidence-based approach to media relations strategy that builds on but meaningfully advances the frameworks developed by the preceding generation of practitioners.

47. Christina Nicholson, Media Maven, Florida

Founder of Media Maven, a PR consultancy specialising in media placement and podcast strategy, former TV journalist, and host of the Become a Media Maven podcast, Christina Nicholson has built one of the most practically engaged audiences among independent PR practitioners in the United States. Her dual perspective as both a former journalist and a current PR practitioner gives her a distinctively useful vantage point on the media relations challenge from both sides of the pitch, and her content on how to approach journalists and secure coverage has been among the most practically cited media relations guidance available to independent practitioners.

Nicholson’s contribution is particularly valuable for small business owners and independent practitioners who are learning media relations without institutional support. Her willingness to share the specific mechanics of what makes a pitch succeed, what journalists actually find useful versus what PR orthodoxy claims they find useful, and how to build genuine media relationships rather than simply sending pitches, provides actionable guidance at a level of specificity that most agency-produced media relations advice does not reach.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several practitioners were seriously considered for the final list but were not included for specific reasons. Shonali Burke, already profiled, was at one point a borderline case for a strictly US-focused list given that her work reaches a global audience, but her inclusion was confirmed given her central role in US practitioner education. Ronn Torossian, founder of 5WPR, is one of the most prolific agency founders in American PR, but his public thought leadership content is weighted more toward business development and agency marketing than toward the intellectual contributions to the field that this list prioritises.

Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew PR, is widely respected for her work in technology communications, but her public LinkedIn presence and published commentary during the review period was less sustained than the threshold this list applied. Mark Borkowski, one of the most creative publicists operating in any English-speaking market, is based in the United Kingdom and therefore outside the scope of this US-focused list, though his work deserves acknowledgement for those interested in the global conversation. Brené Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek appear on almost every list touching on communications and leadership, and for good reason given their contributions. This list chose instead to give that space to voices who equally deserve to be widely known in the PR profession specifically, rather than repeating names readers have encountered many times on other lists.

Common Mistakes When Engaging with PR Thought Leadership

The most common mistake is treating thought leadership as a substitute for practice. The frameworks and insights that practitioners like Gini Dietrich, Katie Paine, and Helio Fred Garcia have developed are genuinely valuable, but reading about the PESO Model or the Barcelona Principles does not substitute for applying them. The communicators who benefit most from following thought leaders are those who immediately translate what they read into something they are trying. Following without doing is one of the most expensive professional habits in PR.

A second common mistake is consuming thought leadership from only one corner of the profession. PR is genuinely cross-disciplinary, and teams that follow only voices from their own speciality regularly miss insights from adjacent disciplines. A media relations practitioner who has never engaged seriously with measurement voices like Shonali Burke or Katie Paine, or a measurement specialist who has never engaged with crisis voices like Melissa Agnes or Judy Smith, is operating with an unnecessarily narrow intellectual toolkit. The most valuable professional development often comes from the discipline you are least comfortable in.

A third mistake is defaulting to the most famous names and ignoring the more practically useful voices who have smaller but more engaged audiences. Some of the most actionable content in the American PR space comes from practitioners like Frank Strong, Michelle Garrett, and Bill Byrne, whose audiences are smaller than the global agency CEOs but whose content is more directly applicable for the majority of practitioners who work in independent consultancies, boutique agencies, or in-house teams at mid-size organisations.

A fourth mistake is engaging with thought leadership reactively, only when a crisis or challenge prompts it, rather than proactively as a continuous professional development practice. The communicators who consistently outperform their peers build regular reading and reflection into their professional routine rather than turning to industry voices only when they are already in the middle of a problem they could have anticipated with better preparation.

A fifth mistake is assuming that the most recent voice on a topic is the most authoritative. The American PR profession has a pronounced tendency toward novelty, treating each new development in AI, social media, or communications technology as if it represents a complete departure from everything that came before. Voices like Peter Himler and Paul Holmes, whose perspective spans decades rather than years, often provide more accurate assessments of what is genuinely new versus what is familiar pattern dressed in new language.

Implementation Guide: Building Your PR Thought Leadership Practice

The first step is identifying which corners of the PR field are most relevant to your current role and challenges, then deliberately adding at least one voice from an adjacent discipline you would not normally encounter. A practitioner in agency media relations might make it a habit to follow one measurement-focused voice and one crisis specialist alongside the media relations commentary they naturally gravitate toward. The cross-disciplinary exposure is where most practitioners find the unexpected insights that change how they work.

The second step is engaging actively rather than passively. LinkedIn is the primary platform where most of the thought leaders on this list share their content. Following them is useful. Commenting with genuine substance, sharing their work with a real perspective rather than a generic endorsement, and occasionally sending a direct message when a piece of content has genuinely influenced how you think or work, is how practitioners build the professional relationships that create real career and business opportunities over time.

The third step is creating a sustainable reading routine rather than attempting comprehensive coverage. Following everyone on this list at the same intensity is unsustainable. Select five to seven voices whose current focus most directly overlaps with your professional challenges. Follow them consistently.

Set a quarterly reminder to revisit your list and update it as your own focus and theirs evolves. Quality of attention to a smaller number of genuinely relevant voices consistently outperforms the attempt to cover everything.

The fourth step is translating insights into conversations. The most valuable thing a practitioner can do with thought leadership is bring it to their team. A research finding about journalist response rates, a new measurement framework, or a crisis case study that illustrates a principle practitioners had only read about abstractly becomes genuinely educational when discussed with colleagues and applied to real situations. The PR teams that generate the most learning from following thought leaders are those that have created space for those conversations to happen regularly.

The fifth step is contributing. Following thought leaders eventually creates the conditions to become one. Every practitioner who comments regularly with genuine insights, shares original observations from their own work, and builds a body of professional writing over time is doing what the best thought leaders on this list have done, just at an earlier stage of the process. The PR profession genuinely benefits from more practitioners sharing what they know, and the voices on this list would almost universally encourage the people who follow them to begin contributing their own perspectives to the professional conversation.

For leadership teams and organisations who want expert support building the communication culture that underpins all of this, Jonno White works with leadership teams globally to build the team dynamics and leadership clarity that make external communications credible. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect, and virtual delivery is available across all time zones.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes someone a genuine PR thought leader rather than just a well-known practitioner?

The distinction lies in the quality and originality of intellectual contribution. A thought leader in public relations is someone whose ideas have genuinely changed how other practitioners think or work, not simply someone who is visible, successful, or widely connected. The clearest indicators are whether they have produced frameworks, research, or arguments that are cited by others without prompting, whether their content helps practitioners solve problems they could not solve before encountering it, and whether they engage with the complexity and uncertainty of the field honestly rather than offering oversimplified or self-promotional commentary.

How was this list compiled, and what criteria were applied?

Every person was selected against three criteria: substantive contribution to how the American PR and communications profession thinks and operates, whether through published frameworks, original research, rigorous practitioner commentary, or leadership of the profession’s most important organisations; active engagement with the field in 2025 and 2026; and genuine, current contribution to the specific disciplines they are associated with, rather than a purely historical reputation. Selection deliberately prioritised practitioners whose contribution to the field is substantive over those who are simply the most frequently cited names, so that the directory surfaces voices who genuinely deserve to be better known.

How do I decide which thought leaders to actually follow given how many are on this list?

Start with the discipline closest to your current professional focus and identify two or three voices from that area. Then deliberately add one voice from a discipline you find genuinely challenging or unfamiliar. If you work in crisis communications, that might mean adding a measurement-focused voice. If you work in digital PR, that might mean adding an academic researcher or an agency business strategist.

Revisit your list every quarter and update it as your focus and theirs evolves. Quality of attention consistently beats quantity of follows.

How should I engage with thought leader content to get the most from it?

Active engagement is consistently more valuable than passive consumption. Comment with a genuine perspective, not just affirmation. Share pieces that have influenced your thinking, and say specifically how. Connect the ideas you are reading about to real situations and challenges in your own work.

And bring what you learn into conversations with your colleagues, because the ideas that get discussed and applied in team contexts become embedded in practice in a way that ideas that stay in your reading list generally do not.

Can I hire someone to facilitate communications culture and leadership workshops for my team?

Yes. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with 10,000 copies sold globally, works with leadership teams and organisations globally to build the communication culture, team alignment, and leadership capability that makes communications strategy credible and effective. Whether your team needs a keynote on leadership communication, a workshop on team dynamics and communication styles using DISC or Working Genius frameworks, or a facilitated executive offsite on strategic alignment, Jonno brings practical frameworks directly applicable to the challenges communications leaders face. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

What is the single most useful thing I can do to build my professional profile in American PR?

Begin contributing publicly and consistently to the professional conversation in your area of expertise. The thought leaders on this list all started by sharing what they knew in accessible, genuine, and regular ways before they had large audiences to share it with. The platform, the audience, and the professional recognition followed the contribution, not the other way around.

Start a newsletter. Write one LinkedIn post per week that genuinely helps someone solve a problem. Comment with actual substance on the posts of practitioners you respect. The professional credibility that thought leaders in this field have built is not a function of their role or their agency’s size.

It is a function of sustained, generous intellectual contribution to a community that recognises and rewards genuine value.

Final Thoughts

Public relations in the United States is the discipline responsible for one of the most fundamental challenges facing American organisations in 2026: earning and maintaining trust in an environment where trust is the scarcest resource. The thought leaders on this list represent the full range of intellectual contributions shaping how the profession addresses that challenge, from measurement frameworks and crisis protocols to digital strategy, community building, education, and leadership communication culture.

The most important takeaway from this list is not any specific name or framework. It is the recognition that the American PR profession is served by a genuinely diverse ecosystem of thinkers, researchers, educators, and practitioners who are actively working to make communications better. Following the right voices is not about completing a reading list. It is about building a professional learning practice that keeps pace with a field that is genuinely, rapidly, and consequentially changing.

For more on building effective leadership teams and the culture that makes great communication possible, check out my blog post 50 Essential Thought Leaders on Personal Branding in the UK at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-personal-branding-uk and 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Public Relations Globally at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-public-relations-globally. Both provide related frameworks for understanding how the best communicators build genuine professional authority over time.

For leadership teams who want to build the internal communication culture that makes all external communications more effective, the work starts inside the organisation. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast, and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams around the world to build the team dynamics, communication culture, and leadership clarity that organisations need to communicate credibly with the world outside.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what that work looks like for your team. International travel is often far more affordable than expected.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements.

Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Public Relations Globally

The global public relations conversation extends far beyond the United States, and the most complete picture of the discipline requires following voices from the United Kingdom, Asia-Pacific, continental Europe, India, and Africa. The field of public relations has genuinely globalised, with frameworks, crises, and professional debates crossing borders at a speed that makes purely domestic thought leadership an increasingly incomplete foundation for American practitioners who work with international clients, cover global media, or simply want to understand where the profession is heading.

My article on the 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Public Relations Globally provides a deep dive into the practitioners shaping how public relations is practised across every major world region, from Nitin Mantri’s work on communications in Asia-Pacific to Johna Burke’s global measurement advocacy through AMEC. The thought leaders in that article represent the discipline’s global dimensions in a way that complements the US-specific voices featured here.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-public-relations-globally