Sometimes fast isn’t fast enough.

As the Rochester, N.Y., reporter for UPI in the ’80s, it used to embarrass me to get a message from BROOKS-NXF (Dorthea Brooks on the New York Financial desk) saying Dow Jones had issued a snap on Kodak’s earnings, and that I should quickly match the story.

Sure enough, an envelope would arrive a few minutes later — via taxi cab — containing the Kodak press release.  For the next couple of quarters, I joined the queue of cabbies in the lobby of Kodak’s headquarters and got the release handed to me personally by the secretary of the PR department, and then dictated a lede to NXF by phone.  I started beating DJ, Reuters and AP.

Kodak’s subsquent use of PR Newswire, and PRN’s willingness to install a feed into my tiny UPI bureau, evened the playing field, though it probably drove a few angry taxi drivers to start buying Fuji film.

AP, Dow Jones and their ilk were built around speed, but subscribers gladly handed over fistfuls of dollars to be first with market-moving information.  No longer.  Not only are Internet delivery speeds faster today, but the democratization and demonetization of information means there’s virtually no barrier to being a publisher or consumer.

Sure, the media elite squawks a lot about the lack of fact checking and quality control among non-professionals.  But I firmly believe in the wisdom of the crowd and am perfectly happy to rely on Twitter or Wikipedia as a primary source of data, knowing that things might be wrong at times — in the same way the mainstream media makes mistakes.

My love affair with new media channels flared this morning while I was sipping my first cup of coffee.  Noisy fire trucks outside my window prompted me to check the live audio stream of FDNY radio transmissions on TheBravest.com, which was bustling with activity because a five-story building had collapsed minutes earlier in downtown Manhattan.

This site has become another prime example of nano-targeting in media.  Its user base is mainly off-duty firefighters, who use lingo like OMD for unoccupied multiple dwelling.  What amazes me is the technology smarts of those operating this site, which is supported by ads for calendars featuring photos of scantily clad female firefighters, and the books and gear used by first-responders.  Within 15 minutes, TheBravest had linked to the web video streams being webcast  by the helicopters of two local television stations, and live web chats were under way among site users commenting about the use of search dogs in the rubble of the building.  New media had connected to mainstream media though, of course, TheBravest wasn’t paying thousands of dollars an hour to charter the copter, hire the camera man, downlink the feeds, etc.

Similarly, did I turn to the tragically understaffed Cleveland Plain Dealer or Akron Beacon Journal for coverage of Saturday’s riot at Kent State University?  No, it was the @kent360 Twitter feed that provided provided the first details of police using rubber bullets to quell student unrest on a hot April evening.

For those who lament the loss of command-and-control newsrooms, these are sad times.

Yet I see the glass as more than half full.  Consumers can quickly get the news they seek, on virtually any topic at any time.  And the new breed of PR pro can truly brand themselves as domain experts and connect directly with the influentials in their sector — armed with nothing more than a Blackberry or iPhone.