Founder, Pace Public Relations

There’s a certain kind of woman who doesn’t wait to be handed the room. She builds it. Annie Scranton is exactly that woman.

Founder of Pace Public Relations, adjunct professor at NYU, published author and one of the most clear eyed voices in communications today, Annie has spent sixteen years doing what a lot of people only talk about. She started with no business training, no blueprint and no safety net. What she had was instinct, a television news background and the kind of passion that doesn’t ask for permission before it gets going.

Flipping the script

Annie spent her early career as a television news producer. Long hours, high stakes, one common goal. She understood instinctively what made a story work: what a journalist needed, what a show would run, what would get cut before air. So when she crossed to the other side and became a publicist, the transition felt natural. “It’s kind of just the other side of the equation,” she says.

What didn’t feel natural was everything else. Because Annie didn’t just become a publicist. She became a founder. At the same time. “I’d never even thought I would start my own company,” she says. There was no mentor who had walked the same path. No MBA to fall back on. Just the steep, real time education of incorporating a business, managing money in an entirely new way and waking up one morning as the boss when the day before, she had one.

The learning curve didn’t stop there. Running an agency meant going from a newsroom where everyone chases one shared goal, to managing multiple clients: each with their own personality, their own definition of success, their own vision of what good PR looks like. “It’s very much a bespoke plan for each client,” she says.

16 years and still unfinished

Sixteen years in May. And she will be the first to tell you it hasn’t gotten old. “The PR and media landscape has changed so much in recent years that I am still evolving, still learning, still growing,” she says. “It certainly has not become rote in any way at all.”

COVID made sure of that. Almost overnight, 40% of Pace’s client base went quiet. The math was brutal and the silence was loud. But the agency adapted. New clients emerged, experts whose work the world suddenly, desperately needed. And something else shifted permanently: the company went fully remote.

Colleagues moved to different cities. The office dissolved. Annie didn’t mourn it. She built something new in its place: an annual staff offsite retreat, smaller gatherings woven throughout the year, a genuine commitment to protecting the lines that remote work loves to blur. “We’ve all worked hard at really trying to honor that work-life balance,” she says.

A good servant, a terrible master

Ask Annie about AI and you won’t get a rehearsed answer. She’s thought about it. Hard.

“If it’s used ethically and responsibly, it’s amazing,” she says. “If you’re not learning how to master it and make it work for you, you’re just not going to get ahead at the same rate as someone who is. That’s just a fact.”

In PR, she draws a clear line. Using AI to write a pitch from start to finish, then copying and pasting and hitting send? That’s lazy pitching. And lazy pitching is what gives this entire industry a bad name. But using AI for ideation, for edits, for efficiency? That’s smart. “It’s a great time saver,” she says. “A way to be more efficient. But the thinking still HAS to be yours.”

She’s more cautious about AI’s role in journalism, where the integrity questions are harder to untangle. But she isn’t catastrophizing either. “People are still always going to need a human on location; someone face to face or on the phone.” Neither industry is going anywhere. But standing still while everyone else masters the tools? That’s a different kind of career risk entirely.

PR 101: the myths, the gaps, the phone

Annie teaches PR at NYU, and every semester, the same misconceptions walk through the door. The biggest one: not knowing the real difference between PR, marketing and advertising. Three disciplines. Not the same thing. And yet, for so many students they blur into one vague concept of “getting the word out.”

But the thing Annie loves watching click into place is newsjacking. The moment a student understands how to weave their client into a real cultural conversation, without it feeling promotional, without it feeling forced, something shifts. The light goes on. “That’s really cool to see,” she says.

She’s also watching something that worries her. Younger professionals have a real hesitancy around direct human interaction. Picking up the phone. Walking into a room. Introducing themselves and holding the conversation. She doesn’t blame them: there was a pandemic and there is an entire generation shaped by screens. But she’s honest about what’s at stake. “Hiring managers want to vibe with you. They want to know you can hold a conversation.” No pitch deck in the world fixes that.

“The public part of public relations will be greatly expedited by AI,” she says. “But the relations part, that human-to-human connection, is never going away as long as there’s humankind.”

Her advice: go to the event you were invited to. Practice your elevator pitch at home before you walk in. Be a little uncomfortable. That’s where the growth lives.

Every. Single. Word.

Kogan Page found her. Asked if she’d write a book on earned media. She said yes and crossed it off the bucket list.

She wants you to know and she says it with emphasis, that she wrote every single word herself. “Before AI,” she adds, laughing.

The book is a road map for anyone who has ever wondered how to make their company, their brand, or their leadership more visible in the world. New to communications or fifteen years in, the question is the same. The answers, she lays out clearly.

Finding her people

Annie is a Smith College alumna and a self-described feminist. Women-led spaces don’t just feel comfortable to her. They feel necessary.

She joined NYWICI drawn by its reputation and its commitment to mentoring the next generation of communicators. She recently sat in on a mentorship Zoom facilitated by Beth Feldman: younger professionals on screen, eyes lighting up as a guest speaker talked through their experiences. Annie watched. Then walked into her NYU class later that day, pulled up the NYWICI website and asked every single one of her students to join. “There was a lot of excitement in that room,” she says.

Because for Annie, this isn’t just networking. It’s something bigger. “We really need to do more to put more women in charge,” she says, in companies, in government, at every table where decisions are being made. “Without women stepping up, we’re teetering on a very dangerous time.”

Smashing it (dot biz)

She recently bought the domain fuckthepatriarchy.biz. The .com was taken, she notes, with a hint of sadness.

She doesn’t have the full plan yet. But she knows what she wants to build: something that amplifies the work organizations like NYWICI are already doing. Something that helps women rise. Something that gives those who want to step up the tools to actually do it.

She bought the domain first. She’ll figure out the rest. Sixteen years of building from nothing, and that is still, unmistakably and unapologetically, her move.

Annie Scranton is the founder of Pace Public Relations, an adjunct professor at NYU, and the author of a guide to earned media published by Kogan Page. She is a proud member of New York Women in Communications. Learn more at pacepublicrelations.com or follow Annie on LinkedIn.