“Whether a man is really entitled to the appellation ‘counsel on public relations’ or whether he should merely be called ‘publicity man’ rests entirely with the individual and the firm that employs him. As we see it, a man who is really counsel or director of public relations has one of the most important jobs on the roster of any concern; but a man who merely represents the old idea of getting something for nothing from publishers is about passé....
“So there is made plain the difference between two terms, the old and the new, both of which have occasioned much natural curiosity among newspaper men. When Napoleon said, ‘Circumstance? I make circumstance,’ he expressed very nearly the spirit of the public relations counsel’s work. So long as this new professional branch live up to the possibilities that their title suggests, they are bound to accomplish general constructive good. Maybe they, at last, will make us forget that ingratiating though insidious individual, the publicity man.”
As indicative perhaps of the growing importance of the profession, an article by Mary Swain Routzahn, in charge of the Department of Surveys and Exhibits of the Russell Sage Foundation, on “Woman’s Chance as Publicity Specialist” published in the New York Globe of August 2nd, 1921, discusses the profession as one of recent development, but of such importance as to deserve the serious consideration of women who are interested in making a professional career for themselves.
The public relations counsel is first of all a student. His field of study is the public mind. His text books for this study are the facts of life; the articles printed in newspapers and magazines, the advertisements that are inserted in publications, the billboards that line the streets, the railroads and the highways, the speeches that are delivered in legislative chambers, the sermons issuing from pulpits, anecdotes related in smoking rooms, the gossip of Wall Street, the patter of the theater and the conversation of other men who, like him, are interpreters and must listen for the clear or obscure enunciations of the public.