PR pundit, and ex-Chicago Tribune hack, Jack O’Dwyer is renowned for his
terrier-like tenacity in pursuit of a story and, to its embarrassment,
this month the Public Relations Society of America has ended up as the
bone.
O’Dwyer has long hauled PRSA bureaucracy over the coals in his weekly
newsletter and monthly magazine but now the friction has spilled over
into the pages of the Wall Street Journal, which has recently recounted
PRSA claims that O’Dwyer - who devotes four pages in his October
magazine to the association’s accounting systems - is conducting a
vendetta against it.
It reports PRSA officials as saying that O’Dwyer is just stirring up a
story for his publications. Speaking from his Madison Avenue office,
O’Dwyer refutes the vendetta accusations. ‘I have made my living for 28
years telling PRSA people what their association won’t tell them,’ he
says.
He does, however, condemn the PRSA for posing the ‘filthy, filthy rotten
question’ of whether he himself tipped off the Wall Street Journal and
says the recent departure of its PR director leaves it ‘like a laundry
without the soap’.
edited by Rebecca Dowman
