Coombs and Holladay (2007)
Coombs and Holladay use the support of the professional literature to find an explanation to the importance stakeholders came to play in their role with the management. Their next movement is back to history, this time deeper to the times where there was no such field as public relations. They start in their investigation with the Anti-Slavery Society, formed by Arthur and Lewis Tappan in 1831. They were among the first to discover the role of using various ways of disseminating information to the public they targeted by using the printed word or by assembling in "meetings, sermons and public lectures." Coombs and Holladay (2007, p. 62). Further examples show how tools specific to the PR industry nowadays were discovered and put to use by simple people who succeeded to start major changes in society: Carry a. Nation, the first woman who made an "event" in order to gain notoriety she would put to further use and whose actions eventually led to "Kansas to become the first state to outlaw the sale and production of alcohol." Coombs and Holladay (2007, p. 64). Another important players the two authors mention in their support of the important role PR plaid and still have in society are the muckrakers. They were the reasons Ivy Lee, one of the first leading figures in PR was used by Rockefeller who needed someone to counterattack the negative voices in the media. Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair are two of the muckrakers the authors use as examples of journalists who used the printed word in publications that were to change the public opinion and that finally led to the birth of new laws or the dismantling of the Rockefeller oil empire.
Coombs and Holladay (2007, p. 67) Thus, the authors establish the dawn of the use of mass-media as the most effective tool in public communication. They show how people...
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