The Flack’s Centennial

The press release turns 100 today. What some have called the most used and abused form of public relations first appeared on this date in 1906, in a statement released to newspapers by a pioneering public-relations man named Ivy Lee. He was doing damage control after an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The moment marked the beginning of the modern public-relations industry, and the man behind it is now acknowledged as one of that industry’s fathers. He was the son of a Methodist minister from Georgia and had the odd name of Ivy Ledbetter Lee. A Princeton graduate and something of an idealist, he believed that business had responsibilities to the public to give back, when possible, and to tell the truth. Doing so, he maintained, would be good for profits too. “Lee maintained that business had to change its policies of closed, individualistic, competitive capitalism to new programs of open, cooperative and benevolent enterprise,” wrote his biographer, Ray Eldon Hiebert, in 1966.

Early in 1906 he was hired by a group of anthracite coal mine operators. A strike loomed that winter—and it was expected that the press coverage would be favorable toward the miners, in part because John Mitchell, the president of the United Mine Workers had always made himself available to the press. The mine operators, on the other hand, wanted no part of reporters. Lee convinced them that they were letting only one side of the story get told. He helped open the lines of communication between the operators and the press, and he got results—including a New York Times editorial that supported the mine operators’ position.

As part of his campaign, Lee mailed to all city editors an extraordinary “Declaration of Principles” that did nothing less than define a new profession, the P.R. man. “We aim to supply news,” he wrote. “This is not an advertising agency. . . . Our plan is frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.”

Lee may have disseminated releases on behalf of the coal operators, but if he did they made no mark on their own. The first successful release came as the result of his work with the Pennsylvania Railroad, which hired him in the summer of 1906. He got his first major test on October 28, when a passenger train plunged off of a trestle and into 20 feet of water near Atlantic City.

That night he issued what he called a “release,” a statement to the press. It provided details of the accident and of the investigation so far into its cause. It did not seek to deny the severity of the crash (in which 57 people lost their lives) or absolve the railroad from responsibility.

At a time when railroads generally went silent after accidents, the release was considered so newsworthy that The New York Times headlined a story the next day “Statement from the Railroad” and went on to print five paragraphs verbatim, in quotation marks.

A “hit” like that, in modern P.R. parlance—an unedited “pick-up” of one’s press release by one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the country—was a triumph then and would still be one today. Its impact was demonstrated shortly afterward when the Pennsylvania’s major competition, the New York Central, had a wreck. “They stayed in traditional railroad mode of not talking to the press,” says Glen Broom, professor emeritus of public relations at San Diego State University. “They were lambasted by journalists, because journalists had seen the alternative.”

That alternative was Lee, who would go on to have a successful but controversial career in the emerging public-relations industry. His most famous client was John D. Rockefeller; his most infamous was Adolf Hitler, whose government he represented indirectly and ill-advisedly in the early 1930s. Critics called Lee “Poison Ivy,” seeing what he did as dishonest by its nature, although he did win admiration from some journalists. In 1908 Editor and Publisher magazine said that material from Lee was “never sensational, never libelous, always accurate, always trustworthy, always readable.”

The same cannot, of course, be said of all news releases. Over the years they have been used and over-used; often by companies and people without Ivy Lee’s savvy or understanding of what the news media required. “It has become devalued,” Broom says. “Many press releases are not even written for the press, they’re written to please some client or boss. So-and-so’s son or granddaughter gets promoted to vice president, a press release goes out, it never has a chance of getting used, but it pleases the client.”

Yet the century-old form remains key part of any public-relations effort, which is why some P.R. and business communicators are taking note of this otherwise obscure anniversary. In September, Business Wire, a New York-based distributor of news releases, announced a slate of conferences, open houses, and seminars at cities around the country this month, looking at where the industry has come since the days of Ivy Lee and where it’s going in the new digitized world.

How did Business Wire choose to announce this anniversary commemoration? With a press release, of course.

—John Hanc is a contributing writer for Newsday and lives on Long Island.