Most people working in public affairs didn’t learn the job in a classroom. I certainly didn’t. And most of the best practitioners I’ve learned from didn’t either.
I learned by doing — by watching campaigns succeed and fail, by sitting in rooms where decisions were being made with incomplete information and real consequences. I wrote things that didn’t work. I read research I misunderstood. I slowly realized that being busy was not the same as being effective.
It took years to notice a pattern that should have been obvious from the start: public affairs rewards people who take the fundamentals seriously. Not just early in their careers, but especially after they’ve been doing the work for a while.
And yet, as a profession, we’re surprisingly bad at teaching ourselves.
There is no shared curriculum. No agreed-upon canon. No common understanding of what everyone should master before they start improvising.
So we improvise from day one. We borrow tactics from the last campaign. We reuse the same playbook in different contexts. We confuse access with influence and activity with progress. When things don’t move, we work harder instead of stepping back.
One belief has become clearer to me over the years: public affairs is about winning public support.
Voters — not politicians — are the ultimate constraint in this work. Elections force clarity. Public opinion sets the boundaries of what’s possible. Campaigns, not arguments, are what actually move outcomes.
Once you understand that, a lot of bad public affairs suddenly makes sense. It also explains why so many practitioners struggle early in their careers. Understanding how public opinion works, how framing shapes perception, how coalitions form, how strategy differs from tactics — these aren’t advanced skills. They’re basic. Most of us are never taught them properly.
After more than 20 years in this field, I’ve found myself doing something that might look counterintuitive. I’m going back to the basics.
Elite athletes are famous for this. Kobe Bryant spent hours on fundamental drills long after he’d mastered them because he understood that fundamentals decay if you stop training them. The greatest players are never too good for fundamentals. They return to them with more intention than everyone else.
The same is true in public affairs.
Writing clearly. Reading research without fooling yourself. Defining what winning actually looks like. Understanding framing. Designing campaigns instead of delivering outputs. These are skills that need deliberate practice, not one-time exposure.
And they are skills I often had to teach myself.
Masters in Public Affairs is an attempt to build the kind of learning I wish existed when I was starting out — and the kind I still want access to now.
Each episode focuses on one core skill in the craft and uses a book that belongs in a modern canon as a training tool as something you can learn from and apply.
Some of the books are old. Some are a tough slog to get through. Some aren’t “public affairs books” at all. That’s intentional. We’re sticking to what works.
If you’re early in your career, this is a way to accelerate learning that usually takes years of trial and error.
If you’ve been doing this work for a long time, this is an invitation to sharpen the fundamentals again.
This project is for people who are serious about this craft, people who want to understand why campaigns work — and why most don’t, people who believe this profession can be learned, and relearned, if you’re willing to invest the time.
If that sounds like you, welcome.
The fundamentals are waiting. Pick your preferred training court: