Annie Pace Scranton sent an email because she needed a job. The television show she had been working on had been canceled, and she was suddenly available. A publicist she knew replied with a small proposition: get his client, a broker with a book about the markets, onto CNBC. The fee would be $500. Scranton passed the details to a producer. A booking followed. For someone looking for her next employer, it was an unexpectedly persuasive argument for becoming her own.
She calls herself an “accidental entrepreneur.” It is an appealing description for the founder of a public relations firm: the professional arranger of other people’s stories discovered hers through an unplanned change in the running order. Pace Public Relations began in May 2010. The useful thing she carried out of television was a working understanding of why a producer says yes.
That distinction matters. A contact list can tell you where to send something. Experience on the receiving end helps you decide whether it deserves to be sent. Scranton had spent years fielding requests, booking guests and helping programs reach the air. Her new business would ask her to approach that same desk from the other direction.
The education before the invoice
Long before she was selling media relations, she was a girl on the Jersey Shore watching Katie Couric. The attraction was television news itself. She grew up with her parents and brother, and her early ambition was to work in the world she saw on screen. The eventual agency founder first wanted a place inside the broadcast.
At Smith College, she became editor-in-chief of The Sophian, the weekly student newspaper. Smith identifies her as a member of the class of 2002. There is a pleasing continuity between editing a campus paper and booking a national program: both involve deciding which people and ideas merit the limited space available. The audience changes; the obligation to choose remains.
Her early television work included a production assistant role at MSNBC with Dan Abrams. She remembers the pleasure of belonging to a team making a live, hour-long show five days a week. The deadline supplied its own management philosophy. Whatever else had happened that afternoon, the program still needed to go on.
Over roughly eight years, her television résumé came to include CNN, Fox News, CNBC, MSNBC and ABC, with bookings for Good Morning America among her assignments. Greenrooms also provided an education: guests became people she actually knew, with conversations extending beyond the transaction of an appearance. For a future publicist, that was a useful apprenticeship in both editorial judgment and manners.
A producer can smell homework
Scranton’s advice about approaching the press is almost aggressively practical. Choose an ambitious outlet and a realistic one. Watch the program. Read the publication. Learn what the journalist actually covers. Then write a personal note explaining why this particular story belongs there. The glamorous part of publicity turns out to involve quite a lot of reading.
She also pays attention to performance. A television guest has to communicate with personality; expertise needs to survive the journey from someone’s head to a viewer’s attention. A perfectly reasonable argument can expire in a lifeless delivery. Scranton’s background helps explain why securing the invitation and preparing the guest belong in the same conversation.
Her approach leaves little room for the idea that an executive’s desire to be interviewed automatically constitutes news. The work is to connect what a person knows with something an audience wants to understand. That requires curiosity about the outlet as well as enthusiasm for the client. The recipient of the pitch has a job to do, too.
The inbox is only the beginning
In conversation about public relations, Scranton returns to the infrastructure around a press appearance. A business should be ready to circulate its coverage. A broadcast interview can keep working after the live segment ends, provided the company has a way to put it in front of the people it wants to reach.
She describes benefits that extend beyond a single burst of attention: clients being approached about books, contributor roles and paid speaking engagements. These are examples she has encountered, rather than promises attached to every engagement. Her account makes clear why the initial business objective matters. A placement can be useful in different ways to different organizations.
The consultant looking for prospective clients, the executive developing a public point of view and the company entering a new market have different reasons to seek visibility. An impressive outlet name does not, by itself, settle which opportunity is appropriate. Scranton’s work involves translating between a company’s ambitions and an editor’s requirements, two parties unlikely to begin with identical priorities.
- Read the roomKnow the outlet and its audience.
- Find the relevanceConnect expertise to a live conversation.
- Make the introductionWrite a brief, personal pitch.
- Use the appearancePut the resulting coverage to work.
Putting the craft between covers
In 2023, Kogan Page published her book, The Guide to Earned Media: How to Use PR Strategies to Enhance Your Brand. Its 184 pages give physical form to a job often conducted through fleeting conversations and short emails. Chapters move through branding, an origin story, goals, an elevator pitch, thought leadership and approaches to print and broadcast.
The intended audience extends beyond established publicists. A business can recognize that it needs press coverage without having the budget to hire an agency. An employee then inherits the assignment, sometimes with little preparation. Scranton wants the book to be useful to that person as well as to communications students and working practitioners.
She has said she would like to see it used in college classrooms. That aspiration fits a career that now includes teaching public relations at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. She completed her own master’s in public relations at NYU in 2018 and has also taught introductory media relations at Hofstra. Experience became a business, then material she could teach.
“Nobody has time to read a long email.”Annie Pace Scranton
There is a mild comic tension in writing a book about a profession that prizes brevity. But the short email rests on everything that happens before it: understanding the organization, recognizing the story and choosing the recipient. The visible output may be small because the preparation was substantial. Her book gives that preparation room on the page.
People before platforms
Scranton also hosts The PR Pace, interviewing people from the communications industry alongside clients and colleagues. It gives her another way to ask questions in public. Her professional life now moves between running an agency, explaining its craft and listening to others describe theirs.
Her family life has a television connection, too. She met her husband, Michael, while they were both producing for Geraldo. They live in Manhattan with their daughter, Rose. Away from work, Scranton has named the beach and reality television among her pleasures. A person can spend the working day analyzing media and still want somebody else to choose the evening’s plot.
The agency’s current team biography describes a collaborative approach to leadership and notes that some former interns now lead departments. Its service list has expanded into areas including influencer marketing and affiliate partnerships. The television foundation remains visible, but an agency built around getting people heard has more than one channel to consider.
Who gets an introduction?
In April 2026, Step Up named Scranton vice chair of its Eastern Region Board, serving alongside returning chair Cori Fernandez of Google Cloud. The organization’s regional boards support fundraising, mentoring and ambassador work. It is a concrete extension of her interest in helping women gain access to professional opportunities.
Step Up’s programs connect girls and young women with mentors, including through short sessions built around particular experiences and skills. That structure gives a familiar professional act, the introduction, a different purpose. A conversation can help someone see a possible route before she has the contacts or experience to follow it.
Scranton has long participated in women’s professional networks, including New York Women in Communications and Ellevate. Her advice to leaders supporting younger women has included a straightforward instruction: listen. Less experience does not mean fewer ideas. Teaching and mentorship make that principle part of the schedule, rather than something reserved for a speech.
Still learning the next conversation
Sixteen years after founding Pace, Scranton is still thinking about how the tools change the work. In a 2026 interview, she endorsed using AI for ideas, edits and efficiency while insisting on human judgment behind the pitch. Her account of remote agency life also includes an annual staff retreat and smaller gatherings to preserve relationships across distance.
These choices have the same practical concern underneath them: people need opportunities to understand one another. A tool may shorten the preparation. A gathering may create a conversation that a routine workday misses. Neither removes the need to notice the person on the other side.
Her founding story supplies a modest example of that attention. Someone remembered a producer who could help. She recognized a guest another producer could use. A fee followed, and eventually a firm. Scranton had asked her network for a job. What came back was a reason to keep making introductions.