Influential Woman · Public Relations

Alison Faris

Senior Communications Manager, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles, CA

Her Story

About Alison

I've been in public relations for almost 14 years, and I'm currently a Senior Communications Manager for the Los Angeles Times, where I'm coming up on 7 years this month. My typical day involves overseeing the external and internal communications for the Los Angeles Times, developing PR strategy and promotional initiatives to help promote our newsroom journalism, and handling all of the communications for the company, our newsroom, and business initiatives. Before working in-house at the LA Times, I worked at 3 different public relations and media agencies in the agency world, and then I switched over to in-house because I was really looking to see how things were on the client side of things. Some of my proudest moments include helping launch the first Latinx vertical for the Los Angeles Times, which is the Delos platform, a Latin culture wing that the newspaper has right now. I've also helped launch several award-winning podcasts, including the Ambi-nominated podcast called Asian Enough, which the Ambis are essentially the Oscars of podcasts. I also helped launch Chasing Cosby, which was awarded on the Online Journalism Awards, and Man in the Window, which won an iHeart Award. Man in the Window was a true crime podcast that looked at the crimes of the Golden State Killer, and it was really interesting because when the podcast released, they still hadn't caught him when our reporter first started it, and they ended up catching him. I'm also very proud of some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that I've helped promote. I'm a mother with 2 small children, so my free time is really just spending time with my family.

Her Interview

Ten minutes with Alison

01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?

I would definitely say nurture relationships. Nurture your media relationships, take the coffee date. I think it's so important to try to nurture relationships in person if you can. Because nowadays, everybody is so digital, everyone's emailing, texting, there's not a lot of face-to-face interaction with people, and I think if you can do that, if you can take the time to go have coffee with a producer, or take a reporter to lunch, those are things that people used to do in the pre-internet days in PR that are very lost these days, and I think there's a lot of value in having in-person connections and relationships with media contacts. I hope we go back to wanting more in person, because I feel like, especially when I think about my kids, they're really missing out on the kind of connections that you used to get just from meeting up with people in person, not just having a phone call or texting all the time.

02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?

I think one of the biggest challenges now is, with the internet, just cutting through the noise. It's a huge challenge to really capture attention in this attention-seeking economy. AI is another big one, obviously. I hate saying it, but it is a challenge because it's changing the way that people and outlets consume news, produce news, so as a PR professional, we really have to understand how AI impacts that every day. In terms of opportunities, I think just really continuing to elevate stories and journalism in different spaces. It's really interesting to see how the shift has happened over the years. When I first started out, the goal of everybody was to be on the Today Show or GMA, right? That was considered the biggest PR win you could get for a client. Now it's not that. Now it's getting people on podcasts. That's where people are really consuming their news. So I think finding ways to get some of the projects that I work on that aren't as popular and getting them into the news cycle is always the goal, and getting them on some of the more popular podcasts, just really getting people from our Delos section, for example, that really focus on the Latino experience in the U.S., and trying to elevate those voices on some of the more popular podcasts, whether it be a parenting podcast, or pop culture, or just trying to find ways to elevate undervalued voices in bigger spaces.

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