Doug Stone, Media Relations and Crisis Communications

Doug Stone, long-time journalist and communications professional, provides PSM clients with communications strategies, media relations, media training and writing support to attorneys, non-profits, government agencies and other service organizations.   Doug’s incisive focus on communications strategy and his long experience developing messages for media and other channels provides top-tier communications guidance for clients.

Whether in front of a reporter or in an advisory role, Doug helps ensure that his clients’ messages are on target, reach the proper audiences and get the attention they deserve.

As a former newspaper reporter, television assistant news director and press secretary to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, as well as a college relations director and teacher, Doug knows media, education and public affairs. He has a wide array of contacts and a solid reputation in the community.

His recent clients include three law firms, a college at the University of Minnesota, the World Press Institute, the Barbara Schneider Foundation, the Unitarian-Universalist churches in the Twin Cities and Apex Golf Enterprises, publishers of the Hacker’s Guide to Minnesota & Western Wisconsin Golf Coures.

Doug was an award-winning reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune from 1971-1981 covering everything from police to general assignment to legal affairs. He won several awards for series on juvenile justice and civil commitment.  He worked at WCCO-TV from 1981-1990 where he was assignment editor and then assistant news director and supervised the newsroom’s political and legal affairs coverage, among other duties. He was the late Sen. Paul Wellstone’s first Washington, D.C., press secretary from 1991-1993. Doug was director of college relations at Macalester College from 1993-2008 where he worked on everything from promoting the visit of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to campus to creation of a series of image advertisements in The New York Times to development of a lecture series in conjunction with Minnesota Public Radio now in its 15th year. During that time Doug also taught a journalism course every year and continues to do so. He has written for MinnPost.com and currently writes a blog for the StarTribune.com’s Your Voices section.

A 1971 honors graduate of the University of Minnesota, Doug also spent a year at Stanford University on a journalism fellowship sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Personal

Doug lives in St. Paul’s Highland Park with his wife, Ann Conroy, and their two daughters, Sadie, 14, and Evie, 12.  Doug has coached his daughters’ soccer and basketball teams and has served as a member of their school’s site council. Doug is a volunteer with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, where he serves on the Public Relations Committee.

For more about Doug Stone Communications, LLC, see his web site at
www.doug-stone.com

To read his take on a variety of issues, see his Strib blog:
http://www.startribune.com/yourvoices/
dougstone.html?elr=KArks47cQiUdcOy_9cP3DiU47cQU7DYaGEP7U

See Doug’s Linkedin Profile:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dougstonecommunications