Technology has dramatically changed the practice of public relations, but Doug Newsom has stayed on the cutting edge

Fort Worth, TX

4/28/2009

Public Relations was a much simpler profession when Doug Newsom started her career in the ’50s. Back then she got the word out about events like the State Fair of Texas or the Southwest Boat Show.

Now, as she nears retirement after decades of teaching, PR is known as strategic communication, and it includes digital global communication and crisis management.

The speed and reach of digital communication have launched a new practice, one that Newsom writes about in upcoming textbooks and in columns in scholarly journals in India and China.

The biggest impact of the Internet on PR has a fracturing of the word “public” into “publics” and to give each of those groups more power — single person and a computer can wreak havoc on a corporation. The internet has not only brought more power to the public, it has added breadth to communication that means messages must be delivered to a far more diverse group of people, each filtering their messages through their own cultural backgrounds. Those are some of the messages she’ll be sharing with a new generation of PR practitioners, in textbook chapters she is updating.

Newsom’s first job was 1937, when she was a 3-year-old child model. Ever since, she has been putting her best face forward and teaching others how to do so as well.

A pioneer in the field of public relations, Newsom is retiring from a 40-year-career as a professor at TCU this spring. Yet scholarly writing continues, as it has over the decades and will after her retirement.

“The most dramatic changes in public relations have come toward the end of my career,” says Newsom, a professor in the Schieffer School of Journalism at TCU and director of the advertising and PR graduate programs.

“With the internet, there is a global context to public information,” Newsom says. “A crisis is no longer just local, it is global.”

The quicksilver speed of digital messages has fragmented a local or national audience into diverse groups worldwide who will receive a message. The change gives more power to more people, for good and for bad, Newsom says.

“Now one person can create a huge amount of trouble for a corporation,” she notes, citing a campaign in India to rid the nation of Coca-Cola bottling plants, accused on a web site of depleting and polluting water supplies.

“PR is much harder now that everything is public,” she says, and that calls for more discourse than ever on how to communicate.

Getting the word out

Newsom still writes regularly for public relations journals in India and China. This year will see the publication of updated editions of two textbooks with chapters written by Newsom. She is the author of Chapter 20, “Public Relations and Integrated Communication,” in An Integrated Approach to Theory and Research and of Chapter 7, “Global Advertising and Public Relations” for the text Global Journalism.  It is her third time updating the chapter on global messages.

Recent works come after a prodigious career in writing that includes being the co-author of three textbooks, including This is PR: The Realities of Public Relations, now in its ninth edition, and Public Relations Writing: Form & Style, now in its eighth edition. Both textbooks have foreign language editions.

She also is the author of 2007’s Bridging the Gaps in Global Communication, a work known for showing how an awareness of local customs enables barriers in understanding to weaken, if not to fall entirely.

“The hardest thing for my students to understand is that you cannot create an image, not out of whole cloth,” Newsom says.  “Everyone brings their own background knowledge to their understanding.”

 Everyone does, she says, everyone in the world.

Going global

Newsom was a North Dallas High School graduate who entered the University of Texas, Austin at age 16 and earned three degrees before she was old enough to vote. With her master’s in journalism, Newsom set out to do publicity for groups in North Texas.

She started as an adjunct instructor at TCU in 1968, teaching one night class in journalism while she still worked accounts and raised children. Within 10 years she earned her doctorate from UT in Austin, and by 1982 she was a professor at TCU.

As the economy grew more global, so did her interest in expanding the practice of public relations throughout the world.

“Public relations really started in the United states as a recognizable practice,” Newsom says. “It was because of the First Amendment and the free market economy. We are free to speak, publish and assemble. We have access to information.”

In 1986 she was presenting a paper in India on public relations efforts surrounding the disastrous pesticide leak at a Union Carbide subsidiary plant in Bhopal, India. Indian television stations covered her talk and the stir drew the attention of a university department head, which started the arrangements for her to become a Fulbright lecturer in public relations at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India in 1988. 

In 1999, she was again a Fulbright lecturer, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Her workshops on crisis communications and global communications as well as other aspects of PR and advertising have brought her to Latvia, South Africa, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Vanuatu islands in the South Pacific, as well as to TCU’s London Centre.

Her global reach includes a vast range of scholarly journal articles, including pieces on how to market the Americas and how to have successful information campaigns in developing democracies.

Closer to home

Last spring the Public Relations Foundation of Texas named Newsom its first Educator of the Year honoree.

The award comes after a long series of accomplishments at TCU.

Newsom, chair of the journalism department from 1979 to 1986, created courses on media writing and public relations writing, and wrote a grant to incorporate global communications into advertising and public relations courses at the university. She developed the advertising/public relations master’s program and she designed a journalism class for online studies.

The number of students Newsom has touched is impossible for even her to estimate. Along the way she supervised graduate thesis topics as varied as communications among oil and chemical companies and their employees to the marketing of the Texas Motor Speedway. She’s supervised senior honors papers on bilingual advertising, the global classroom, and many, many more.

In all, she’s found TCU to be a great place to work on program innovation.

“One of the things I really enjoyed was serving as the chair for an accreditation committee in Texas. We went on 33 tours of journalism and mass communication programs,” Newsom says. “I found that TCU is a very collegial place. People here really want to help each other out. It’s not like that everywhere.”

Into the community

Beyond her academic life, Newsom has volunteered her skills in public relations and advertising to local organizations, including the Episcopal Women’s Caucus, the Tarrant Area Community of Churches, the Fort Worth Opera board, the American Heart Association, the Youth Orchestra of Fort Worth and others too numerous to name.

She also has served on boards and advisory councils for ONEOK, a diversified energy company, the Gas Technology Institute and the Fulbright specialist panel.

Newsom says she’s worked every day of her life since her first child modeling job in 1937. The effort shows in her long list of accomplishments.

Yet she is modest, and in her career she sees one of the greatest lessons of public relations:

“I’m only as good as what I did yesterday. You can’t rest on your laurels, they wilt quickly.”