Priceline is my go-to resource for hotels. Some of the entrepreneurs and VC-backed companies I’ve assisted for the past few years were not flush with cash, so there was always a question mark about whether I’d be reimbursed for travel.
The “Name Your Own Price” model personified by William Shatner worked like a charm to minimize my cash outlay, just in case I got stuck eating the expense.
Many times, I’d wait until the day of travel to visit Priceline. My modus operendi was to visit Expedia to check retail prices, Hotwire to find the lowest price for a particular category in my target neighborhood, and then Priceline to underbid the Hotwire price.
So I’d routinely lock in places like the downtown Minneapolis Westin for $69 (stayed there Tuesday), the Kimpton-owned Onyx Hotel in Boston for $110 or a W in Chicago’s West Loop for $90.
I have owned Priceline stock, helped in the capture of Priceline as an account at PRN before my departure, and shared a few tweets with @WilliamShatner, an avid Twitter user.
Killing Shatner in a fictitious bus crash is a bad idea.
When I screened the commercial this morning for my wife, a former surgical ICU and burn nurse, she was aghast. After treating hundreds of accident victims in her career, she didn’t see any humor in a bus accident.
Her reaction to Priceline’s violent and painful way of offing Shatner confirmed what I was feeling in the pit of my stomach, and what I learned in journalism school — never joke about a tragedy. We’ve all passed the scene of a fatal accident or experienced the loss of a loved one in a vehicle crash, so it’s off limits for humor.
Yes, I laughed at the Saturday Night Live skits in the 1980s about Toonces the Driving Cat, because cats don’t drive. But William Shatner is a real person. We’ve grown up with him as Captain Kirk and chuckled at his oversexed antics on Boston Legal.
Rather than killing our pal, it would have been better to choose more ridiculous way for him to disappear — leaving Priceline free to pursue its next branding chapter. Maureen suggested a UFO abduction. I kind of like the idea of him hearing noises in his hotel mini bar and getting sucked into a vortex of miniature booze bottles.
The backdrop for this post is snowy Cleveland, where I spent eight of my 20 years working in the commercial newswire business. A short return visit this week to the Midwest — including stops in Chicago and Minneapolis — brought back a flood of memories that included many victories and a few business SNAFUs.
In the late ’80s, when spell check consisted of a well-worn dictionary sitting next to the editorial desk, we relied on eagle-eyed editors reading each press release aloud to a colleague before hitting the SEND button and distributing the copy to media across the nation.
Our earliest word processing programs – like Xywrite, Word Perfect and later, Word — helped catch many typos, thanks to internal dictionaries. But, as former colleagues and competitors reminded me on my Midwest newswire reunion tour, spell check didn’t stop these doozies:
In the personnel release announcing my appointment to PR Newswire, I was described as a veteran pubic relations executive.
A release concerning a sensitive restructuring release for a leading carrier referred to the company as Untied Airlines.
The surname of John Balch, CEO of vacuum cleaner maker Royal Apppliance, became Belch.
A big box electronics retailer was rebranded as Best But
The first name of Goldman Sachs went out as Goddamn
As I looked out my hotel window at the snowy streets of Cleveland and the gathering storm clouds over Lake Erie, I flashed back to those unpleasant phone calls with corp comm execs who rarely knew about the typos until we shared the bad news. And the worst was yet to come. After hanging up the phone, we inevitably transmitted a correction that called attention to our mistake and inspired guffaws among those reading the wire in newsrooms and brokerage houses. The business relationships rarely survived those incidents.
So what’s the current state of affairs in the commercial newswire industry? A quick search of “manger” revealed numerous instances of a livestock pen being substituted for the word “manager.” My old favorite “pubic” also gets plenty of play, including a recent Oracle release.
I am leaving my hotel happy that I don’t have to call Larry Ellison’s PR team to grovel.
I grew up in one of the seemingly small number of Rochester families without a relative employed by Kodak.
But that doesn’t mean the once-mighty photographic empire didn’t touch my life.Kodak’s expected bankruptcy filing conjured up memories of sight, sound and even smell.
Anyone who lived in western New York in the 1970s and ‘80s likely remembers the spike in print and broadcast automobile advertising in March when the more than 50,000 Kodak workers cashed their annual “Kodak Bonus” check.The jingle “Piehler, Piehler, the Pontiac Dealer” still echoes in my brain.
Unfortunately, the stench of Kodak wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the Piehler jingle.Smokestacks near Kodak Park spewed acrid plumes and rained gritty particulate onto cars parked downwind.
As a teenage ice cream truck driver, I’d leave my car parked near the Lake and Ridgeway Skippy Ice Cream depot for long periods.The “Kodak rain” prompted plenty of pollution conspiracy theories – and hose downs of our cars. Around that same period, high levels of carcinogenic chemicals were detected in the ground water on nearby Rand Street.
One thing Kodak did very well – in addition to manufacturing film, batteries, copy machines and, more recently, inkjet printers — was generating news.
As the Rochester reporter for UPI, I was on the receiving end of many press releases produced by Kodak’s formidable media relations operation and blue chip PR firms like Hill & Knowlton. While most of the “news” was far from time-sensitive, Kodak’s quarterly earnings announcements were of critical importance.
Because Kodak was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other key indexes in those days, the financial newswires like Dow Jones and Reuters routinely issued a headline within seconds of the NYSE:EK release crossing PR Newswire or Business Wire.
But the secretary in Kodak’s PR department openly complained about lengthy service delays at the commercial newswires. Her solution to make sure market-moving news was quickly delivered to the Democrat & Chronicle, Times-Union and Rochester TV and radio stations was to assemble a line-up of taxicabs outside Kodak Office on State Street.
So that’s where I stood on the mornings Kodak issued its earnings.As Joan Miller delivered envelopes to the cabbies, I ran with the press release to a bank of pay phones at Kodak headquarters and called in the earnings numbers to UPI’s financial editor, Dottie Brooks. By 1985, I was using my first laptop computer — a Radio Shack TRS80 Model 100, complete with an acoustic cup modem — to write Kodak earnings stories.
Beating AP, Dow Jones and Reuters consistently on breaking news from Kodak was an obsession.
A defining moment in my relationship with Kodak came after a federal judge ruled that Kodak had infringed Polaroid’s patents in the creation of a Kodak instant camera.My editor at UPI, Steve Geimann, jazzed up the headline: “Kodak Convicted of Stealing Polaroid Trade Secrets.”The comms guy at Kodak, Charlie Smith, went too far in expressing his displeasure over the headline.A bridge was burned.
From that day on, I shot Fuji film.
I grew up in one of the seemingly small number of Rochester families without a relative employed by Kodak.
But that doesn’t mean the once-mighty photographic empire didn’t touch my life.Kodak’s bankruptcy filing conjured up memories of sight, smell and even taste.
Anyone who lived in western New York in the 1970s and ‘80s likely remembers the spike in print and broadcast automobile advertising in March when the more than 50,000 Kodak workers cashed their annual “Kodak Bonus” check.The jingle “Piehler, Piehler, the Pontiac Dealer” still echoes in my brain.
Unfortunately, the taste of Kodak wasn’t nearly as perky as the Piehler jingle.Smokestacks near Kodak Park spewed acrid plumes and rained gritty particulate onto cars parked downwind.
As a teenage Skippy ice cream truck driver, I’d leave my car parked near Lake and Ridgeway avenues for long periods.The “Kodak rain” prompted plenty of conversation – and hose downs of our cars. Around that same period, high levels of carcinogenic chemicals were detected in the ground water on nearby Rand Street.
One thing Kodak did very well – in addition to manufacturing film, batteries, copy machines and, more recently, inkjet printers — was generating news.
As the Rochester reporter for UPI, I was on the receiving end of many press releases produced by Kodak’s formidable media relations operation and blue chip PR firms like Hill & Knowlton. While most of the “news” was far from time-sensitive, Kodak’s quarterly earnings announcements were of critical importance.
Because Kodak was a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in those days, the financial newswires like Dow Jones and Reuters routinely issued a headline within seconds of the NYSE:EK release crossing PR Newswire or Business Wire.
But the secretary in Kodak’s PR department openly shared her disgust over lengthy delays at the commercial newswires. Her solution to make sure market-moving news was delivered to the Democrat & Chronicle, Times-Union and Rochester TV and radio stations was to assemble a line-up of taxicabs outside Kodak Office on State Street.
So that’s where I stood on the mornings Kodak issued its earnings.As Joan Miller delivered envelopes to the cabbies, I ran with the press release to a bank of pay phones at Kodak headquarters and called in the numbers to UPI’s financial editor, Dottie Brooks.
Beating AP, Dow Jones and Reuters consistently on breaking news from Kodak was an obsession.
A defining moment in my relationship with Kodak came after a federal judge ruled that Kodak had infringed Polaroid’s patents in the creation of a Kodak instant camera.My editor at UPI, Steve Geimann, jazzed up the headline: “Kodak Convicted of Stealing Polaroid Trade Secrets.”The comms guy at Kodak, Charlie Smith, went too far in expressing his displeasure.A bridge was burned.
Many people say the holidays are depressing because they don’t have friends and family with whom to celebrate. Then there are those who dread the fact that they will have to celebrate with friends and family, and all the inevitable drama.
For me, it’s the business aspects of year end that tend to make me verklempt. December is the time entrepreneurs tend to throw in the towel.
In a note from NewsBasis founder Darryl Siry, the former Tesla Motors media relations chief explained that options for funding and acquisition failed to materialize, so he is shutting down and taking a CMO position for ProSight Specialty.
NewsBasis came on the scene after Peter Shankman’s success in creating Help a Reporter Out, an ad-supported clone of PR Newswire’s subscription service ProfNet. Once HARO was acquired by Vocus, some reasoned there was an opening for another platform to connect the media and PR professionals. New York Times reporter Claire Cain Miller wrote a glowing pre-launch piece about NewsBasis in August 2010.
Another shutdown notice involved VisualCV, a site that aimed to provide jobseekers a video resume so they could differentiate themselves from those analog shmucks who only send text-based CVs. The recruitment firm Heidrich & Struggles provided funding, along with Valhalla Partners and iNovia Capital.
I’m not sure what went wrong with VisualCV. but it is quite revealing that the company’s final post was done as text rather than video.
All is not gloom and doom in startup land. My childhood friend Bob Ertischek will be launching Profology, a social network limited to those who work in higher education. The founder of Techrigy, Aaron Newman, also just filed papers in Delaware for his new technology startup. I’m truly excited for these guys as they enter 2012 with fresh ideas.
Ever since we adopted Lucy from the woman who rescued this three-legged poodle from an animal shelter outside Cleveland, Lucy has suffered from rotten teeth, ear infections, itchy skin and a never-ending propensity to bite her hind quarters. Medicated shampoos, antihistamines, antibiotics and topical lotions offer little relief.
Of course, New York City is always ready to offer help to the seemingly endless supply of deep-pocketed pet owners willing to spend generously to correct Fifi’s overbite or restore Lance’s coat to its puppy-like luster. We took Lucy to a doggie dermatologist, who charged us $750 to rip a cell sample from her hair and skin with a piece of transparent packing tape, which they studied under a microscope to see if the infection was bacterial or yeast. Novel, but damn expensive.
Several years and millions of scratches later, Lucy paid another trip to a vet this week. Our goal in bringing her to see Dr. Thoulton Surgeon (yep, that’s his real last name) was to get her teeth scaled and to extract the rotten tooth.
Dr. Surgeon, who made a point of telling me he didn’t attend Cornell University’s veterinary college so he could sell expensive dog food, is a serious practitioner. He looked at Lucy’s skin condition and frowned. He then proceeded to share the contents of a presentation he gave a month earlier during the Veterinary Dental Forum conference in Boston, where he lectured about early successes his patients were experiencing with clinical trials of nitric oxide therapy.
Huh?
PLASON device - NO (Nitric Oxide) therapy
After assuring me he didn’t mean laughing gas (nitrous oxide), Dr. Surgeon wheeled in a machine about the size of a small cappuccino maker and explained the Russian-made Plason device could generate heat of 3,000 degrees Celsius. But the cool “arm” of the machine emanated a steady stream of puffs that, when applied to lesions, seemed to kill bacteria, yeast and other cells that inhibit the healing process.
Lucy didn’t mind being blown on by the machine. I loved knowing that a machine capable of creating a lightning bolt was being tamed by a doctor willing to buck the veterinarian establishment in the interest of science — and reducing Lucy’s wigginess.
We’ll bring Lucy in for a few months and let you know how the treatment progresses.
Unfortunately, the one promise Dr. Surgeon was able to make about the Plason device was that it could not stimulate her missing leg to regenerate. “This isn’t stem cells,” he chuckled.
John MacLeod Williams, who led PR Newswire through tremendous sales growth in the 1990s and successfully extended the paid press release business model into China in recent years, died suddenly Tuesday in Chicago. He was 66.
John, an avid boxer and exercise buff, had been working out when he collapsed, said his wife, Donna Manke Williams, who on Thanksgiving had not yet finalized funeral arrangements. He and Donna lived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and also owned a home in Granville, Vermont.
Facebook tributes to John from current and past PR Newswire employees poured in this morning within minutes of a posting about his death. Many highlighted his inspirational leadership style and outsize personality.
“He was an Alpha Male for sure. He took a bite out of life and let the juices run down his chin. I’m sure he packed more living in those 66 years than most do in a hundred,” wrote Jeff McHugh, a software engineer who worked in PRN’s Philadelphia bureau.
John joined PR Newswire in 1986 from Business Wire, where he helped establish a New York office for the rapidly growing San Francisco-based company. At PR Newswire, which had pioneered the commercial press release distribution industry in 1954, John set about creating a culture of sales, service and product innovation.
He emphasized media relations, understanding that unless reporters and editors used the content they received from PR Newswire, sales would founder. Dorthea Brooks, a legendary business editor for United Press International, was recruited. John also hired former Unipressers Jerry Mitchell, Tom Madden, Fred Ferguson, Neil Hershberg and me.
From 1989 to 2008, John was a constant source of inspiration — and occasional irritation — as he continually questioned the status quo, demanded better performance from the finance and technology departments at PRN, and took jabs at British parent company United Business Media their laser focus on profits over investing for long-term success.
In addition to accelerating PRN’s growth through broadcast fax and fax-on-demand products, John added theatrical touches that at times proved hilarious.
At a sales conference in the early 1990s, he donned a Fruit of the Loom grape costume. At another, he tried to recruit Mr. T to promote the launch of an early Internet “T Button” that allowed interactivity on press releases. During the inaugural PRN “President’s Club,” John chartered deep-sea fishing boats and arranged for a private helicopter tour for the elderly father of one sales exec.
In 2002 John volunteered to expand the commercial newswire business model to China, where a relationship with Xinhua News Agency gave credibility to PRN and allowed it to thrive. During one of my last business trips with John, he bore wounds familiar to many Beijing locals — injuries suffered in a bicycle crash. He kept his bike in the kitchen of his apartment.
Fitness was at the center of Williams’s life since he stopped drinking in 1989. A fixture at a swimming pool near PR Newswire’s former headquarters near Times Square, Williams also boxed. It was not uncommon for a young, fit PR Newswire employee to arrive in the office with a broken nose or a black eye, trophies of a boxing session with the boss. When we discussed partnering with AudioNet, the event streaming business started by Mark Cuban in 1995, the deal was sealed when John hopped into the ring with Cuban’s female biz dev executive, Julie Smith.
Outside the ring, John took delight sharing his fortunes with others. When he built a home in rural Vermont, he invited PR Newswire employees for camping weekends, drawing into the woods some nervous visitors who had never before left the five boroughs. In a very private case of philanthropy, John met a quadriplegic man in the same rehabilitation facility treating his father. John donated a computer equipped with a head visor that allowed his new friend — a former author and academic – to move the cursor with puffs of breath, freeing him to communicate via email.
Born near Buffalo, in Dunkirk, N.Y., John M. Williams grew up in the newspaper business. His great grandfather founded the local daily, The Observer, in 1882, where John’s father MacLeod was editor. John earned a degree at Syracuse University, enlisted in the Air Force and served two tours in Vietnam.
His career at UPI involved assignments in New York and Los Angeles, where he covered the murder trial of Charles Manson. He never stopped playing copy editor at PRN, alerting staffers to grammar and spelling mistakes and insisting on prose that would impress our two key audiences — PR professionals and journalists.
In addition to his wife, John is survived by two sisters, Julia MacLeod Williams of Richmond and Sarah Williams McCrane of Poquoson, Va.
John meant a great deal to me and hundreds of people who worked with him through 30+ years in the newswire business. Rest in peace, John.
The funeral service for John Williams will take place on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. at the Cartmell Funeral Home, 150 Court St., Plymouth. Friends and relatives are welcome to the visitation at Cartmell Funeral Home on Sunday from 3:00 to 5:30 pm. Cremation will take place at Vine Hills Crematory, Plymouth.
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I attended John’s funeral yesterday in Plymouth. Other PR Newswire people paying respects included Charlie Morin, Jerry Mitchell, Todd Grossman, Larry Thomas, Dave Haapaoja, Mark Nowlan, Mary Salzillo Levine, Heather Schwanke and Michelle Beaudreau. Donna appreciated the show of support for John’s work at PR Newswire.
Consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton's uber-professional booth awaiting shipping on the final day of PRSA.
For the entrepreneur founder of a startup, exhibiting at a trade show is like being a gum chewer in Singapore.
Rules are going to get broken.
At the just-concluded Public Relations Society of America conference in Orlando, a walk through the exhibition hall was a study of extremes – from deep-pocketed corporations with dedicated events staffers to tiny tech firm with products barely out of beta.
The legacy companies were resigned to the fact they had to pay hundreds of dollars a day to the on-site exposition management company to rent little things most of the conference attendees don’t even notice – items like tablecloths and skirts, booth carpeting and monitor stands. Because the larger corporations had already invested five figures on construction of custom booths, shipping and sponsorship fees to PRSA, the added fees were little more than a nuisance.
For mid-sized companies like the fast-growing firm I just joined, Critical Mention, there’s a bit more fiscal scrutiny. My colleague, Steve Shannon, did a quick calculation and determined we could save $1,100 by buying TVs at an Orlando Best Buy rather than renting. Of course, shipping the TVs back to headquarters in New York would add to the bill and most likely damage the units, so Steve made a second smart decision and donated the brand new TVs to Give the Kids the World, a Florida charity for children with life-threatening illness.
At the extremely frugal end of the trade show spectrum, there are startups who are just starting to bill for their product but not yet making any profits. In one case, the founder and CEO just about choked when he saw the ridiculous list of rental charges.
There was no way in hell this guy — who still pulls all nighters writing code and knows each of his accounts on a first-name basis – was going to pay a multimillion-dollar expositions company to drape his table with a $20 skirt that would cost him hundreds of dollars to rent for three days. So he took the risk of getting busted by the trade show police and bought a black bed sheet at Target and used it to wrap his table. Then he hit Lowe’s and picked up a gray carpet remnant to cover the hideous orange pattern of the ballroom carpeting.
Another decision would happen after PRSA ended, the CEO confided. If he didn’t pick up any business at the show, he could always return the items for a refund.
Every December, after I’ve labored long and hard to create a rhyming holiday card for friends and family, the envelope from Ted and Sherri Pincus arrives.
Ted was the founder of the Financial Relations Board, a powerhouse investor relations firm with headquarters in Chicago. I worked for years to win the FRB’s business in the early 1990s at PR Newswire, and Ted stayed in touch after selling his agency to Interpublic Group in 1999. He died this week, at age 78, after losing a battle with cancer.
Witty writing is generally not part of the IR business. Maybe it was pent up frustration with not being able to show off his inner Dr. Seuss during the FRB days, but the annual holiday card sent out by Mr. and Mrs. Pincus was an amazing fete. Stanza after stanza of rhyme, punditry and a recap of the year always brought a smile to my face — and made me a bit ashamed that my own card was only two or three lines of verse.
I will always appreciate Ted and his president, Michael Rosenbaum, for patiently listening to my pitch about the direction that corporate disclosure was moving, and for taking their client base online with PRN. FRB ultimately became the largest account for our Cleveland office and a strong driver for our acquisition of PR News Service, co-owned by the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune.
Rest in peace, Ted.
( Link to Legacy on-line guest book for Ted Pincus )
The old days of media monitoring involved picking up the daily newspaper while you grabbed a cup of coffee in the morning or having a TV-monitoring service record a segment onto a VHS. It was fairly easy to monitor coverage and, unless the news was big, the story usually began and ended with a single clip. Well, the days of being able to easily track the full lifespan and reach of a story has ended.
Even with PR professionals having an unprecedented number of high-tech tools at their disposal, it takes more than DVRs and search engines to measure the impact of a single article or TV segment. It takes a paradigm shift.
In today’s converged media landscape, a newspaper story can appear on the newspaper’s website, get excerpted on blogs or syndicated on sister sites, and end up on the Twitter and Facebook feeds of all their readers. The same is true for a TV segment. A clip from the 5 o’clock news broadcast is also on the TV station’s website, syndicated on affiliate sites, featured on topical blogs, posted into YouTube, and spread all over Twitter and Facebook. In fact, content produced by a TV news outlet can more than double its terrestrial audience within a week of when it was posted online, and then continue in perpetuity to gain viewership.
For example, one segment that aired on WIAT CBS 42 in Birmingham, AL, had 40,609 TV viewers but more than 1 million online viewers. Another segment that aired on ABC 12 News in Milwaukee, called “News camera captures lawmaker being tackled by police,” received 105,000 TV views but went on to receive almost 50,000 online views on numerous Web outlets.
As a PR professional, if your news is good, you want to make sure that you’re effectively tracking it and that your clients or colleagues are aware of its success. If the news is negative, you’ll need to again make sure the content is accurately tracked so you can assess its impact on your brand and determine how and where to address it.
Monitoring the life cycle of video content is more difficult than print content. For example, a recent segment headlined “Atheists sue transit authority for rejecting bus ads” was picked up by 60 websites, including news sites and parenting and political blogs. TV content is no longer siloed to a box and discoverable only in one place.
Brand safety depends on knowing both the content of individual video clip and where each clip lives. Is the content positive or negative? Was the clip syndicated onto other sites, YouTube, or other blogs?
But the actual video content is only half the battle. Online video opens up a larger conversation about your brand to everyone who views the clip. For every Twitter or Facebook share, every comment about the video gives viewers an opportunity to speak out on your brand. These viewers, ranging from the competitors to the press to average consumers, create discussions about your brand that have gone unmonitored for too long. These social conversations must be evaluated just like the video and print content to which they are attached.
Today, keeping up with your brand in the media requires that you find this content, examine it, and track its lifespan. It also requires that you recognize that broadcast is not the be all and end all. A sizeable amount of video content has a greater reach online than it did when it originally aired on TV. PR professionals must rethink brand monitoring to track broadcast, print, online, and social, and measure it and educate constituencies on its impact. Anything short of that will fail to provide you with a full picture.
My Op-Ed piece ran on PR Week’s web site on September 23.
I grew up during Rochester’s Top 40 wars as a WAXC groupie.
When I couldn’t find the weekly hit list next to the 45s at Duke Spinner’s or Neisner’s, I picked up a copy in person at the Channel 10 building on East Avenue or, later, at 50 Chestnut Plaza.
Program directors Larry White and Bob Scott tolerated my nerdiness and allowed me to hang around — first answering the request lines and later running the board during the Sunday morning God Squad shift (and American Top 40!). I was 14 when I trekked to the FCC’s offices in Buffalo to take the test for a third-class certificate, allowing me to run the 5,000-watt WAXC transmitter.
My on-air debut occurred during summer school recess, when I was in the WAXC newsroom volunteering my services as the kid who makes calls to police agencies looking for juicy stories. The newsroom CB radio crackled to life about a car crash in the infamous Can of Worms highway interchange east of downtown Rochester and I ran a note into Bob Scott, who was doing afternoon drive. Rather than reading the item himself, Bob found a helicopter sound effect, told me to hop on a telephone and pretended I was “Dandy Dave in the Beanie Copter.” The chopper was phony but the traffic information was real – and my radio career was born.
Doing morning and afternoon traffic reports on WAXC and its successor, WWWG, was a dream job for a 14-year-old kid. Having my crackly adolescent voice mocked occasionally was part of the fun – especially when DJs like Springer Jones, Dan “Money in the Morning” Money and Tom Keller were doing the ribbing.
My move to WHAM and WHFM happened at the ripe old age of 15, thanks to program director Jack Murphy. I worked morning drive with the “world’s tallest midget” Jack Slattery and the dean of farm radio George Haefner, and Maggie Brooks and Bill Lower were our news anchors. After Jack Murphy, other WHAM talent of the era included Dave Laird, Paul Trembley, Mike Harvey and Chet Walker.
As if being the on-air traffic reporter at the top-rated radio station wasn’t good enough, another big career break happened in 1978 when Mark Frank, the local reporter for United Press International, wrote a feature story. The lead focused on me being too young to drive a car while, at the same time, directing tens of thousands of drivers each day. Mark’s article got lots of play and I relished the attention.
To this day, I have wonderful memories of riding my bicycle from the Browncroft neighborhood, through deserted pre-dawn streets, to WAXC and WHAM. The day mob boss Sammy Gingello was rubbed out, I heard the explosion, went back to sleep and, hours later, pedaled past the crater outside Ben’s Café Society at Stilson and East Main streets. These are not storybook childhood memories, but they contributed to my career in journalism and business – and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.
This weekend, I head back to Rochester for a reunion of the city’s radio industry professionals. I am very lucky to have been a part of the business. Thank you to everyone who made it possible.
Many people say the holidays are depressing because they don’t have friends and family with whom to celebrate. Then there are those who dread the fact that they will have to celebrate with friends and family, and all the inevitable drama.
John MacLeod Williams, who led PR Newswire through tremendous sales growth in the 1990s and successfully extended the paid press release business model into China in recent years, died suddenly Tuesday in Chicago. He was 66.
I will miss his cards.
