In Canada, women make up roughly two thirds of the public relations profession. They are the majority in the classrooms, the majority in the entry level roles, and the majority climbing through the middle ranks. And then somewhere around the senior level, the numbers flip. The leadership tables in PR firms and communications departments across the country look nothing like the profession they are supposed to represent. This is not a new observation. The data has been there for years.

Here’s what’s new. Two researchers decided to stop describing the problem and start asking a harder question. Not how do we get more women to the table? But why does the table keep failing the women who get there. Because what the data also shows, and what too many PR women know personally, is that the exit is often quiet and deliberate. Not a firing. Not a failure. A decision. A moment where a woman who is absolutely capable of leading looks at what it costs and says this is not worth it. 

This episode is about what is driving that decision, and what it is going to take to change it.

Listen For

4:15 Why Do Women Hold Fewer Than 30% of Senior PR Leadership Roles?

7:11 What Does It Mean to Rethink the Leadership Table?

9:15 How Can PR Organizations Create Sustainable Leadership Careers?

15:06 What Can Women and Men Do to Change PR Leadership?

17:03 Why Won’t Teaching Women to Play Golf Solve Workplace Exclusion?

Guests: 

Amy Thurlow

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Colleen Killingsworth 

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Most women don't lose their voice all at once. It happens slowly, quietly, and with the best of intentions. They soften their tone here. They hold back an opinion there. They make themselves a little smaller, a little easier, a little less. Until one day they can't quite remember what they actually sound like.

This episode is about that. Where the muting comes from, what it costs, and what it takes to find your voice at midlife.

Listen For

3:30 What Does It Really Mean to Find Your Voice at Midlife?

5:03 Why Do So Many Women Feel Ready to Explode in Midlife?

7:13 Why Are Assertive Women Judged Differently From Assertive Men?

12:19 How Can Women Process the Unspoken Grief of Not Having Children?

16:19 When Should You Speak Up, and When Should You Protect Your Peace? 

Guest: Priya Sudarsanam, Speech Pathologist

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Doug Downs

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There’s a booming business in divisiveness. And PR is caught right in the thick of it.

Recorded at the June 2026 IABC conference in Toronto, Doug Downs speaks with Fred Cook about A Quiet Shift, a report exploring how polarization is reshaping public relations. Cook explains why division is damaging society, mental health, and business while making thoughtful communications counsel more valuable. 

They examine echo chambers, outrage as a political and media strategy, the possibility that AI reinforces existing beliefs, and the disappearance of productive dialogue. Cook also outlines how PR education must evolve, emphasizing crisis management, finance, government relations, public affairs, ethics, and responsible technology use. Ultimately, the conversation challenges communicators to adapt without contributing to the very divisions that create demand for their expertise.

Listen For

2:33 How Is Polarization Changing Public Relations?

5:38 Why Can Polarization Make PR More Valuable—and More Vulnerable?

6:25 Is AI Reinforcing Bias and Deepening Polarization?

9:01 Which Skills Will Future PR Professionals Need Most?

12:00 Why Does Calling the Other Side “Stupid” Destroy Dialogue?

Guest: Fred Cook, Director USC USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations

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Doug Downs

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Generic messaging fails for a simple reason. It speaks to everyone, which means it actually speaks to no one. The messages that stick, the ones people repeat, forward, and act on, are never written for "employees" or "stakeholders" or "our valued customers." They are written for one person, with one specific frustration, in one specific moment. 

That’s not a nice idea about storytelling. It’s a framework, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it in every all-staff email that gets ignored and every campaign that gets remembered. 

In this episode we get the five tip framework behind stories that actually stick, from a communicator who has spent her career studying why some messages disappear the moment they’re sent while others get repeated for years.

Listen for:

3:17 The Five-Step Framework for Sticky Stories

7:12 Finding the Frustration: Real Communication Examples

10:34 Break the Fourth Wall to Make Messages Memorable

13:54 The Recipe for Stories People Remember

Guest: Eduvie Martin, FCIPR, Past President of IABC UK and Ireland

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Doug Downs

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Reputation isn’t your shadow anymore. It’s your operating system. 

It’s no longer something you manage. It has already been decided, by AI, based on patterns inside your organization you may not even know exist. Most leaders still think about reputation the old way: crisis plans, issue management, damage control after the fact. But AI now reads every signal a company puts out and connects them across every location and every stakeholder, drawing its own conclusion about who you really are. A bad manager in one city used to stay local. Now it can become your global reputation by tomorrow morning.

There is a scale that runs from head in the sand to full reputation architect, and most organizations are stuck somewhere in the middle, reacting instead of designing. This episode gets into why reputation now functions like a credit score, why one recent report put a seven trillion dollar number on it globally, and why the real work ahead is not protecting your brand but architecting the patterns underneath it, before AI does that job for you.

Listen For

3:35 Why should organizations stop managing reputation and start architecting it?

5:13 How does reputation become operational currency across an organization?

7:48 Why is brand more than a logo or a “cowboy hat”?

10:45 How is AI becoming a stakeholder in your reputation?

16:35 How can leaders tell if they are reacting, managing, or architecting reputation?

Guest: Bonnie Caver, Reputation Lighthouse

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Doug Downs

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What happens when a conference has no keynote, no formal agenda, and no single expert at the front of the room?  

The new IABC International Chair calls this an “unconference” model. And it’s one glimpse of how professional associations can evolve: by creating space for communicators to learn directly from one another. 

Also in this episode – why community, credibility, and connection matter more than ever in a profession being reshaped by AI, shrinking budgets, and rising expectation, the changing role of communicators in the age of AI, and why earned media, credible third-party sources, FAQs, and even the press release may be gaining new relevance in AI search. 

Listen For

4:13 Why was the ABC Designation Considered Tougher than the SCMP?

5:34 How is AI Making Earned Media and Press Releases Valuable Again?

8:09 Why Should Communicators Bring FAQ Pages Back for AI Search?

9:56 Why are Chief Communications Officers Gaining a Stronger Seat at the C-Suite Table?

17:11 How Is IABC Rethinking Chapters With Community Models and Unconferences?

Guest: Richard Kies, Incoming IABC International Chair

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Doug Downs

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As a communications professional you’re operating in the most complex information environment in history. Misinformation. Disinformation. AI generated deepfakes of executives saying things they never said. Audiences who have stopped trusting what organizations tell them. Employees who can't tell what's real. And somewhere in the middle of all of that noise you’re still expected to move people. To make them understand something, feel something, and do something. With the same frameworks you have always used.

Dianne Chase has written a book that argues the profession needs a North Star more than it needs another tactical playbook. She’s the past International Chair of IABC, past Chair of the IABC Southern Region, and current president of IABC Charlotte. Her book is called The Seven C's of the New Communications Compass. And the argument she makes is both simple and urgent: in an era of collapsing trust, the communicators who will matter most are not the ones with the best tools. They’re the ones who remembered to be human.

This episode was recorded on location in Toronto in June 2026 at IABC World Conference

Listen For

3:16 What Are the Seven Cs of the New Communications Compass?

6:16 Why Should Organizations Build Relationships Instead of Transactions?

8:19 How Does Compassion Become Empathy in Action?

13:09 Why Does Community Matter to Purpose-Driven Brands?

17:10 How Should Communicators Measure What Really Matters?

Guest: Dianne Chase, President IABC Charlotte, past International Chair IABC, past Chair IABC Southern Region

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Doug Downs

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Communications has always been built around a sender mentality. We decide what people need to know, we package it, we push it out. That model came from journalism and broadcasting, three networks, eleven o'clock news, one message for everyone. It made sense then. 

The infrastructure has changed completely since. Audiences have become producers. People choose what they consume, when they consume it, and they unsubscribe from what no longer serves them.

That transformation happened entirely in the outside world. Inside organizations, almost nothing changed. And the question this episode keeps coming back to is a simple and uncomfortable one: why are we still broadcasting when everything outside us has already moved on?

This episode was recorded ON LOCATION at IABC World Conference in Toronto in June 2026.

Listen For

4:34 How did audiences become producers of their own news and information?

6:16 Why does internal communication need to become recipient-driven?

9:33 How can communicators create identity moments that cut through white noise?

11:28 How did opening in Spanish create a powerful diversity and inclusion moment?

16:51 How is AI changing the communicator’s role from creator to prompt strategist?

Guest: Brad Whitworth

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The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication

The IABC Guide for Practical Business Communication: A Global Standard Primer

Doug

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Every communications campaign you have ever built had a choice architecture inside it. The order you sequenced your calls to action. The option you listed first in a petition. The default you set in an employee survey. The way you structured a crisis response. 

You made all of those decisions. Some of them deliberately. Most of them by instinct, habit, or convention. And the difference between those two things, between deliberate design and accidental design, is the difference between a campaign that moves people and one that wonders why nobody moved. 

This episode was recorded live on stage at the IABC World Conference in Toronto on June 14th, 2026, in front of an audience of communications professionals from around the world. 

Listen For

4:20 What Choice Architecture Means

5:52 The Default Effect

6:50 Printer Defaults Example

8:15 Removing Friction from Sign-Ups

9:31 The EAST Framework

Guest: Ann-Marie Blake

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Doug

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Recognized as the most listened-to PR podcast in the World by Podchaser, Goodpods, and data from Rephonic.

Also recognized as one of best Independent Interview podcasts by the Ear Worthy Newsletter

https://storiesandstrategies.ca/podcast/

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