Jim Abernathy is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of The Abernathy MacGregor Group, the nation’s leading financial public relations and crisis management consultancy. With offices in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, AMG provides counsel to clients in the entertainment, e-commerce, financial services, transportation, banking, retail, communications and utilities industries.
Prior to establishing the firm in 1984, he spent a decade at American Broadcasting Companies, the last three years as vice president of corporate affairs, with responsibility for all of ABC's corporate public relations, corporate advertising, external communications, and investor relations. Mr. Abernathy, who began his career as an editor of several broadcasting trade publications, had previously spent two years as vice president for public and investor relations of Warner Communications Inc., and six years as a public relations and investor relations executive at CBS Inc.
Mr. Abernathy is a past president of the Investor Relations Association, and while at ABC, was chosen by Institutional Investor as one of America's ten best investor relations executives. He graduated from the Hackley School (’59) and studied history at Brown University.
Mr. Abernathy is an overseer of the Brown University School of Medicine, a trustee emeritus of the Hackley School, a director of The World Policy Institute, a founder of Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba, a former member of the board of directors of the Caron Foundation (one of the nation’s most respected alcohol and drug recovery facilities), former chairman of Caron New York, director of The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence and a former director of Episcopal Charities.
In his role as a director of The Caron Foundation, Mr. Abernathy helped to establish an alcoholic and drug treatment program in the former Soviet Union in 1988 as well as founding under Caron’s aegis, the first “western” alcohol and drug treatment center in that country, in Moscow, in 1989. In 1994, he assisted in introducing that same program in Cuba and sponsored a Cuban therapist for training in the United States. Mr. Abernathy has visited Cuba many times and helped found several organizations dedicated to changing U.S. policy towards Cuba.
