Elizabeth
Fuerst

Liz Fuerst is a public relations specialist in corporate and non-profit newsletters. As director of First To Know Communications, publishers of newsletters in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and beyond, she regularly intersects with the business and non-profit communities and understands their public relations needs. She has taught in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies for several decades and has helped place students in key public relations internships and fulltime jobs. Her fields of specialty include in-print and online publications and using social media in public relations. 

Fuerst began her journalism career as a teenager when she got a summer job with her hometown newspaper outside Philadelphia. She wrote for Philadelphia Magazine and was an investigative news reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer before moving to New Jersey. She has been a reporter, bureau chief, and editor with the Hunterdon Democrat,  Courier News, and New Jersey Monthly and has freelanced for New York Times, Star-Ledger special projects team, the Asbury Park Press, New Jersey Countryside magazine, New Jersey Savvy Living magazine, Antiques Journal, Working Woman, Skylands magazine, Rutgers Magazine, 1766 Magazine of the Rutgers Alumni Association, the Baldwin School Echoes, and many others. 

While running a public relations firm, she wrote about airports and air travel for ewrzone.com; food and restaurant dining for the James Beard Foundation in New York; and New Jersey lawyers for the New Jersey Supreme Court Committee on Attorney Advertising, ensuring that media advertising and websites fit state regulations. She is the author of four books, including New Jersey’s Best Shopping, a guide to New Jersey shopping, dining, and recreation, and has won kudos for the multimedia iBook she co-authored, 9/11 Stories: The Children, about the children of New Jersey victims of the World Trade Center collapse. Lately, she has shifted into travel writing. She is perfecting a new Substack about where to spend four-day weekends in the United States and a few select foreign destinations. She travels widely, assuring her readers that all research is done in person and is up to date.

Fuerst believes in donating writing and publication services to non-profits and schools that have yet to support fulltime public relations staffs. Among the many non-profits she has done pro-bono public relations for are: Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey, Philips Academy in Newark, New Jersey, and the Jacobus Vanderveer historic house and museum in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Fuerst’s primary interest in teaching public relations is to engage young students of journalism who may find the world of PR exciting and perhaps are even looking for a back door to the executive suite along with a master’s degree or MBA. During the semester each student learns to write sharper, improve communication skills, and expand the art of using media channels to promote a company’s brand.