William Murray :: New PRSA President and COO Agrees To Interview

The PRSA announced their new President/COO. And, he has agreed to an interview after he takes the reins in January.

He is William Murray. View the PRSA release: New PRSA President and COO.

William Murray

When I read the announcement, I thought why not see if we can get an interview. So, I called Murray’s California office. He returned the call rather quickly, actually. Thanks, William. I hope we may do an in class interview with William Murray on January 29. I’ve written to Cedric Bess at PRSA to help set up the call. I’ll keep you posted.

Previously, Murray served as “Executive Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer of the Motion Picture Association (MPA).” (Source)

During his time at the MPA, Bill was instrumental in designing a framework for Hollywood to respond to the challenges presented by changing technology. Rather than simply attacking piracy in the traditional fashion, Bill developed a multi-disciplinary approach which addressed the legislative, public relations, legal, and technological aspects of the issue, an approach intended to allow film and television producers to maximize the potential of new technology while aggressively confronting piracy threats. Over a 20 year career at the MPA, Bill designed the MPA’s first strategic plan, worked with a variety of foreign governments on film production and trade policy, and held a series of positions at the MPA that included responsibility for the Association’s international operations, strategic planning, market research, and digital strategy. (Source)

What will this mean for PRSA? Murray does not have a large footprint online. I can find few articles where he was either the author or interviewed. But, I did find two.

Murray’s Web site contains these BusinessWeek articles: Manage your media content — or else! and The upside to video uploads.

The upside to Murray’s writings are that he is a proponent of “both proactive and reactive plans,” whereas too often PR today is mostly reactive - or numbing silence.

James Grunig will likely be happy with Murray as he calls for PR to have a seat at the table. In a five step process for “proactively managing content-related issues faced by media-driven companies” Murray writes the following:

The process starts with assigning a leader to a cross-disciplinary team that includes representation from business development, legal, sales, government affairs, research and development (R&D), strategic planning, information services and public relations.

So, it looks like we will have a cool interview to kick off our own blogging and podcast activities in class at The Loveliest Village blog. I’ll cross post this over there, too.

I wonder if Phil Gomes knows William Murray? He (Murray) is, after all, a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future. Phil?

Update: Cedric Bess writes back to say that although we may not get the January 29th date, he will write back about an interview after Cedric has had a chance to sit down with Mr. Murray and he (Murray) can get settled in to the new role. So, cross your fingers.