Jennifer Stephens Acree is accustomed to having an answer. She has advised executives, worked inside Yahoo and run her own communications agency since 2009. Then she joined a local pickleball league, where her friends had the sporting credentials and she had a paddle. In August 2026, she wrote about the experience of becoming a beginner. An incoming ball has a wonderfully limited interest in your résumé.
The detail is useful because Acree’s working life depends on experience: knowing whom to call, understanding what a business needs to explain, recognizing when a requested announcement needs more thought. A game gives her a different assignment. Learn alongside other people. Make your intentions clear. Accept that an attempt can go astray.
That willingness to participate runs through her career. At JSA+Partners, the Santa Monica agency she founded, she has made partnership a guiding idea. It extends to clients, the colleagues learning the business and, more recently, shop owners trying to recover after the Los Angeles fires. The interesting part is what she asks a relationship to do once the introductions are over.
Before she had her own initials on the door
Acree graduated from the University of Southern California in 1992, studying political science and business administration. Her career began on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide. She later joined the corporate practice at Burson-Marsteller, became director of public relations at Business.com and held senior communications positions at Overture Services. Yahoo acquired Overture in 2003.
At Yahoo, she became vice president of corporate communications, with responsibility for consumer web products. She received PRWeek’s 40 Under 40 recognition during her time there. Those jobs put her inside organizations whose decisions had to be explained to people outside them. They also gave her experience of the relationship between a company and the advisers it hires.
In January 2009, after leaving Yahoo and the birth of her daughter, she started JSA Strategies. The letters were her initials. Looking back on the fifteenth anniversary, she described taking the leap into working for herself. A name assembled from initials can sound rather inevitable after a business has lasted fifteen years. At the beginning, it is simply a person putting her judgment up for hire.
The client is allowed to hear a different answer
The business eventually became JSA+Partners. Acree has explained the change as a reflection of how she wanted people to work together, across job titles and across the boundary between agency and client. The added word gives her firm something to live up to. Anyone can put partnership on a website. A client asking for an unhelpful approach provides a more revealing test.
In a 2024 conversation with Michelle Valenzuela Wolf, Acree described the habit she tries to teach her team: “we aren’t yes, people for clients.” She spoke about understanding a client’s goal and explaining the route the agency believes will work. The delivery matters. Advice has to be clear enough to change a decision and considerate enough to keep a conversation open.
Her public recommendations suggest that clients recognize the distinction. Steve Ellis, who worked with her while building and selling WHOSAY, credits her with keeping the business on message and challenging his course when necessary. It is a useful endorsement for a communications adviser. The compliment includes an admission that she sometimes made him reconsider.
There is also a less formal side to her way of connecting. Acree and Wolf first met at a bar during a women’s awards event in Los Angeles. Their conversation became the beginning of a friendship and, eventually, a podcast interview. Even a career built around professional introductions can benefit from an encounter that nobody scheduled.
The agency’s work spans technology, digital media and gaming. Its client history includes Yahoo, Electronic Arts, Sphere and Exploding Kittens. Those names supply variety; the recurring task is finding an explanation that makes sense beyond the company’s own walls. JSA’s work around the Exploding Kittens Netflix series, for example, explored how an audience could follow a game into television. The product announcement opened a larger conversation.
Give the intern something worth doing
Acree applies the partnership idea inside the office, too. The agency’s stated principle is “ideas win, people don’t.” Taken seriously, that makes a demand on the senior person in the room. An idea needs to be examined on its merits, including when it comes from someone with very little experience and a calendar full of university deadlines.
Her mentoring has received outside recognition. In 2022, Ragan named her a Mentor in its Top Women in Communications Awards, describing an internship program that gave students practical agency experience. The account also described her helping her teenage daughter explore entrepreneurship. Teaching the work was already part of her life in more than one setting.
In May 2026, Acree returned to internships in her own writing. She argued for giving students ownership of projects, access to real decisions and assignments connected to what they hope to learn. She also described the demands this places on managers: explain the purpose, offer guidance and make time for feedback.
That is a particularly concrete expression of her approach. A beginner needs someone to explain why a task matters. A manager who can provide that explanation has had to clarify it first. There is value on both sides of the desk, provided the experienced person is willing to spend the time.
“ideas win, people don’t.”
A principle of working together at JSA+Partners
The numbers have to earn their place
A communications agency also has to account for what its work produces. Acree’s firm has been building technology around that problem. By 2024, it had introduced Coverage Analysis and Tracking Solution, or CATS, a proprietary system for tracking and analyzing coverage. It also offered JSA LaunchPad, a six-month communications program for early-stage startups.
By 2026, the software effort included Fogline, described as a communications intelligence platform that had developed from an internal tool into an early-access software product. The agency had brought in its first full-time software engineer. Alongside the familiar business of counsel and media relationships, Acree was supporting a different kind of development work.
Her writing about artificial intelligence gives that investment some context. She has described using AI to help with routine tasks, media research and refining copy, while keeping experienced people responsible for strategy and relationships. The aim is to make time available for work that calls for judgment. A faster research process still leaves somebody responsible for deciding whether the resulting suggestion makes sense.
She has also made explaining the profession part of her public work. Acree and her colleagues write Talking Points, a newsletter about media and communications, and she contributes business essays to Inc. Her connection to USC continues through its Center for Public Relations board of advisers. The career includes advising companies, developing people and putting her thinking where others can examine it.
When the neighborhood needed the contacts
The Los Angeles fires in January 2025 brought the work close to home. Acree’s parents’ house, her childhood home in Pacific Palisades, was destroyed. She helped establish the LA Strong Comms Coalition with JSA colleague Cassie Lawrence and Angela Alvarez of Zeno Group. A professional network became a way to organize practical assistance.
The coalition brought together people from agencies of different sizes and independent communications practitioners. They offered affected small businesses help with messaging, media outreach and reaching customers. By January 2026, the group included more than 40 communications professionals and had supported almost 20 businesses. By April 2026, the coalition reported more than $150,000 in donated PR support.
Reported value of pro bono PR support from the LA Strong Comms Coalition by April 2026.
The businesses had names and distinct problems. Bonjour Fête needed attention for its online products while its Palisades store was unusable. Florist Rosalyn Phipps developed Root + Petal after the loss of Palisades Flowers, working from her dining room and delivering from her car. Communications help had to follow the business each owner could actually operate.
The coalition documented its process in a Disaster Comms Playbook so that people elsewhere could organize similar support. That gives the effort a life beyond the original introductions. Someone facing another local disaster can borrow the structure, adapt it and spend less time inventing a way to begin.
Acree has written that the fundamentals of communications hold across company sizes, even as resources and room for error change. Her career now supplies a particularly tangible setting for that idea. The skills used to explain an internet company can also help a florist tell former customers where to find her. The scale changes. The person on the receiving end still needs something clear and useful.
Back on the pickleball court, Acree has another small exercise in making herself understood. Playing doubles means deciding who will take the ball and saying so. For someone whose agency name includes the word partners, it is an appropriately practical assignment. Even after years of giving advice, there is room for a new lesson in speaking up.