When the dining room of a popular gourmet restaurant in Manhattan was gutted by fire, the refrigerators were packed with expensive food that needed a new home — fast!   The solution: a donation of truffle butter, fiddleheads and other goodies to a nearby soup kitchen.

Same goes for leftover crusty French baguettes, asparagus spears whose tips have been used by a finicky chef and pans of fresh tuna steaks trimmed to the wrong size and rejected by the intended restaurant.

These tasty donations — a regular occurrence at Broadway Community’s Inc.’s soup kitchen, on Broadway at West 114th Street in Harlem — are a stark contrast to the institutional-sized No. 10 cans of food heated up and ladled out at many facilities serving the underprivileged.

The stories I hear from my wife of 23 years, Maureen Fitzpatrick, sous chef at the gourmet BCI soup kitchen, never cease to amaze me.  After preparing today’s lip-smacking lunch of lamb tagine, Maureen raced to her cookbooks for details on blinis and creme fraiche. Why? Because Wednesday’s meal promised to be even more incredible, thanks to the donation of an $1,100 tin of Petrossian caviar by someone who wants to remain anonymous.

Chef Michael Ennes and volunteers like Maureen and chefs John and Bob are able to add back a bit of dignity for the 200 or so souls who are served restaurant-style — no paper plates –  in the basement of Broadway Presbyterian Church.

Thanks to a generous connoisseur of caviar, the kitchen’s last meal of 2009 will be world-class fare in a world that has been less than fair.

Don’t let the mustard-colored sports coat fool you.  Tom Kunz is one hip CEO.

As head of Cenury 21 Real Estate LLC, Kunz is in an industry that’s being disintermediated by the Internet      and ravaged by the recession.  Yet I have never met a more positive, open-minded and technology-friendly executive.

What does he do right:

• He’s not afraid to experiment. Century 21 pulled its TV advertising budget and spent the cash to bolster its presence online. Kunz says brand recognition for the franchise was already in the high 90s, so there was no reason to spend millions on 30- and 60-second image spots.  The company is contemplating a switch back to TV, but it would be a web-based format where Century 21 branding was visible at all times on the screen.

• He understands the time-sensitive nature of news. When Congress extended incentives aimed at first-time homebuyers, Kunz dropped what he was doing to record a 2 minute presentation on a tiny, inexpensive Flip video camera. His comments were up on Century 21’s YouTube channel within minutes.  As of today, the video had been watched nearly 1,700 times.
• He takes counsel from Matt Gentile, Century’s 21’s director of corporate and brand communications. In an interview with PR Week’s Eric Iacono, during the Next conference, Kunz talked about making media outreach in local markets a priority.  By incorporating interviews with local print and broadcast media into trips, and inviting local Century 21 franchisees to participate, the organization lands extended coverage rather than the short soundbites afforded by national media.
• He doesn’t hoard good information. While many CEOs would stay silent about marketing strategies, Kunz is a walking dictionary definition for transparency, even sharing his age (61) with the crowd.  As for naysayers, he advises them to watch the AT&T  “Lost Dog” YouTube spot to explain power of social media.

I also liked Tom’s ability to be self-effacing in a manner that seemed genuine:  “I’m a gadget freak,” he told those attending the Next event at the Waldorf Astoria. “It doesn’t mean I know how to use them all, but I buy them all.”

Tom was kind enough to do a short interview with me following his appearance at Next. Please excuse my camera work, as his head is halfway out of the frame for portions of the video.  Yet another reason I never worked in TV.

My former boss had a funny line to describe how often the owner of a mid-sized New York investor relations agency showed up at free media breakfasts:  “He’d show up to the opening of an envelope.”

These days, any exec who attended the plethora of events aimed at professional communicators would be hard pressed to get their work done — assuming their job wasn’t eating rubber chicken lunches in hotel ballrooms and attending tweet-ups.

Barely a day has passed since I finished reading tweets from those attending the annual research symposium of the Society for New Communications Research (whose SNCR acronym is pronounced like the caramel-nougat-peanut candy bar) outside Boston.  Now, some of those very same techie flacks are heading to San Diego for the big Public Relations Society of America conference.

But wait, we’re not through yet. Thursday marks PR Week’s NEXT event in New York City.  On Nov. 12, 18 and 19, Steve Etzler’s  Business Development Institute is holding three separate forums.  Before the month’s out, there’s even a PR Camp in New York, the brainchild of Atlanta comms veteran Dan Greenfield.

I’m pretty sure the above list doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of autumn events designed to provide professional development — and a nice revenue stream for organizers.   Other organizers who do a quality job with educational events include  Women in Communications, the International Association of Business Communciators, National Investor Relations Institute, Mediabistro and Infocom Group.

The unprecedented fragmentation taking place among publishers, industry associations,  entrepreneurs and ad hoc groups involved in PR means there’s plenty of idea sharing and peer conversations taking place at these events.  The sad reality, though, is that many would-be attendees have to hold down the fort because of a lack of adequate staffing and a downhold on corporate travel expenses.

Anyone who wishes to see the PRSA action in real-time should keep their eyes on Twitter posts with the #prsa09 hash tag as well as a live video stream from dna13 on Monday, November 9 starting around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time.   This free access to the conference can be found at http://blog.dna13.com

Venture capitalists have a friend in the freshman congressman from upstate New York,  Rep. Scott Murphy, D-Glens Falls.

A former VC himself, Murphy is getting an earful from investors who complain about onerous federal laws that hamper business.  Like immigrant-run U.S. startups stymied because of  the cost of getting H1 visas. Or an unwillingness by NYSE Euronext to hold an annual issuers’ meeting in the United States because so many foreign CEOs do not hold U.S. visas.

Murphy, 39,  won Kirsten Gillibrand’s Congressional district after she was appointed to fill the Senate seat being vacated by incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  A newcomer to politics, Murphy spoke to New York VCs during a breakfast session at Alan Patricof’s new firm, Greycroft Partners.

While there were some lighter moments, such as one attendee misnaming the employee-sponsored H1B visa the “H1N1 visa,” most of the concerns voiced by VCs surrounding legislation that could thrust regulation on venture firms.

“It’s a ridiculously broken system,” Murphy said of the likelihood of enacting any meaningful immigration reform anytime soon.

Murphy acknowledged lobby efforts by the National Venture Capital Association to keep VCs from being caught in the same net as high-interest payday banks, hedge funds and the mortgage broker industry.

Other issues clearly giving VCs agita were proposed taxation of carried interest and the refusal of regional banks to make loans to small businesses — even to those with positive cash flow.

On a bright note, Murphy characterized Washington as having “strong brain power,” rather than a bureaucratic malaise.

He also said there is strong support for elimination of capital gains taxes for startups, along with other programs friendly to the “innovation economy.”

“It’s in our genes,” he said of the entrepreneurism of Americans, pointing out the adventurous spirit of  ancestors who opted to travel by boat to the new world.

By Alice Fong,

Business Editor, The Ticker

On Oct. 15, four leaders in the public relations industry spoke in a panel dubbed “The Changing Dynamics of Public Relations” at Baruch College. The event was streamed live and Twitter comments were projected in real time.

The industry leaders described how the public relations industry has changed, and the course it will take moving forward.

The conference was hosted by Baruch MarkLab, a resource center that connects Baruch students and marketing industry professionals.

The panel discussion was webcast live and open to Twitter comments and live feedback from the audience.

Dave Armon, former president of PR Newswire, a provider of information distribution services, moderated the panel.

The panelists reflected on the change that the public relations industry is currently undergoing.

“Change is tough for everybody,” said Jeff Gluck, a leader in external communications for the General Business division of IBM, “The industry is going through tremendous change right now.”

He cited the recent sale of BusinessWeek magazine to Bloomberg LP.

Gluck remembered receiving public relations information through the mail. Now the public relations industry has moved to the web.

“Digital communications is name of the game,” said Don Middleberg, founder and CEO of Middleberg Communications, “my clients would rather be in BusinessWeek.com than in BusinessWeek.”

Yet mainstream media still has “an extraordinary amount of influence in catalyzing the conversation,” said Peter Himler, founder and principal of the New York media consulting firm Flatiron Communications LLC.

A provocative business story in mainstream media reverberates in the public.

This news in mainstream media is seemingly magnified through Twitter. Twitter functions in a similar way to PR Newswire or Business Wire for companies.

It allows knowledgeable individuals to disseminate information to interested parties.

“Now, it’s not about mass; it’s about niche,” said Middleberg. “Employees can become ambassadors and take that load off of the internal communications department,” said Himler.

This is a change from how information in the public relations business used to flow. “PR people played an integral role between the newsmaker and the news reporter,” said Himler, “it was always top down.” Public relations would work with their clients to make sure that they advanced their media agenda.

Now the content on blogs and Twitter feeds bypass the media filter.

“All of a sudden, the newsmaker has a voice in what ends up in editorial domain,” said Himler, “People’s media consumption habits have changed…it’s no longer top down.”

However, the goals of companies have not changed. “Every company, every institution still wants its brand in the media,” said Himler, “only the means to that end have changed.”

Technology, such as Google news alerts, now enables public relations companies to follow what people were saying about their clients. Bill Southard, founder and CEO of Southard Communications, is active in trying to understand what is going on with the company’s clients.

“We’ll do ongoing competitive analysis for our clients,” he said.

Public relations started in the early 1900s with “press agents,” paid individuals who tried to influence journalists for various interests. This sparked the rivalry between public relations people and journalists.

Middleberg suggested that the public relations industry is a great business.

“It’s a great opportunity to come in and be a sharp, smart strategist right now,” said Middleberg.

To succeed in public relations, Gluck suggested hard work and preparedness.
“Be selective about whom you follow, and read tweets that interest you,” said Middleberg. He looked for academic leadership and intellectual curiosity.

“Think about your resume and what’s going to ‘pop’ there,” said Himler. “Go out and play with these [web] tools, then put them on your resume,” said Himler.

Personal branding is also very important in the business. “You can’t stand too many bad stories that are your doing,” said Gluck. Students should aim for “a brand of integrity, a brand that stands for something,” said Middleberg.

Middleberg offers an internship to Baruch students at his firm, Middleberg Communications, on what he calls “McDonald’s wages.”

The panelists cited paid or unpaid internships as a way for interested students to get a foot through the public relations door.

The media execs attending lunch at the Paley Center for Media Tuesday seemed relieved that they could take a break from watching their P&L’s get jackhammered by scrappy new entrants with tiny cost structures.

Not that the topic of conversation at this week’s schmoozefest, “The Great Digital Debate: Free vs. Paid Content,” was much of a diversion.

The biggest guffaws came when media futurist Shelly Palmer likened the media industry’s focus on free-versus-paid content to worrying about what song the band was playing aboard the Titanic.

The CEO of National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller, sounded a shrill warning for news organizations who might be tempted to begin charging for their content on the Internet.

While acknowledging the difference between NPR’s charter, which prohibits charging for content, and commercial journalism, Schiller said pay walls demonstrated “elitistm” and threatened to alienate the very audiences with which media organizations should be engaging.

Steve Brill, the founder of American Lawyer and CourtTV, now runs Journalism Online. He dismissed criticism of his latest company’s business goal — to provide publishers with mechanisms through which they can charge for content.

Brill asserted that no news organizations have been able to survive on advertising alone, saying that publishers have always had to balance circulation revenue with advertising and other factors to arrive at the right mix.  One example he gave was the free magazines provided to passengers on the Delta Shuttle, on which hundreds of thousands of well-heeled business passenger have flown for years.  While readership could easily be puffed up through such giveaway programs, there was a price to pay on the subscription side of the business.

Commodity content — weather, lottery numbers and roughly 90% of the material most news organizations present on their web sites — would not be good candidates for subscriptions, cautioned Brill.  The other 10% could command a fee, and Brill claimed to have received 1,200 inquiries from “affiliates” eager to begin charging.

A video of the entire discussion was added today to the Paley Center website.

Mirage? M&A drought appears to be ending in PR, marketing space.

After a long drought, M&A is picking up among the service providers relied on by many corporate communications departments and their agencies .

Entrepreneurs seeking funding for their new initiatives are also breathing a sigh of relief that venture capital is again flowing, with the disruptive ad buying network TRAFFIQ getting $10 million in new funding from two firms yesterday.

In the PR space, the perennially loss-making Medialink video news release business was put out of its misery by Shoba Purushothaman’s VC-backed digital video warehousing startup, TheNewsMarket. Medialink needed a new digital business model and TheNewsMarket had to find a way to help its subscribers generate more content, so we’ll see if a merger can be the catalyst for growth.

The place I called home for 20 years, PR Newswire, pulled the trigger on a deal Friday to buy The Fuel Team, the longtime partner behind the PRN “Media Room” and “IR Room products.”  As with the Medialink/NewsMarket, PRN obviously sees the logic in being a repository for its clients’ myriad digital assets  — not simply text press releases.

Another transaction that closed in the past couple of weeks is Techrigy, the social media monitoring company acquired by the fast-growing UK-based marketing automation roll-up Alterian.  Unlike VC-backed competitor Radian6, Techrigy was privately owned and built its business as an OEM solution more than a retail supplier of monitoring.

Who will buy Radian6 and lesser known SM monitors like Crimson Hexagon?  What about legacy VNR producers — like KEF Media Associates and On the Scene Productions – suffering from shrinking demand for glossy, made-for-TV productions?

Another potential acquisition target is Peter Shankman’s advertising-supported ProfNet clone, Help a Reporter, and Feedroom, which suffers from a TheNewsMarket-vs-Brightcove identity complex.

In their quarterly communications with shareholders, the publicly traded PR services firms Cision and Vocus revealed their M&A agenda. Vocus, which hasn’t had a blockbuster acquisition since buying PR Web in 2006, said it would prefer not to use its extra cash for a share buyback.  Rather, CEO Rick Rudman, said he’d target companies that provide one or more of the same services as Vocus, to expand the customer base; or firms that could be added into the Vocus platform to create a new capability; or an organization in an attractive geographic region not currently served  by Vocus.  Cision, on the other hand, is plagued by debt and actively divesting its European media monitoring businesses to concentrate on its software product, CisionPoint.

Other entrenched PR/IR/marcom services players with money to spend include Berkshire Hathaway’s Business Wire; Thomson Reuters; Nasdaq OMX, which owns Globe Newswire and the IR web-hosting service Shareholder.com; and Jorn Lyseggen’s unconventional sales powerhouse Meltwater Group, which recently began selling a social “buzz” product on top of its inaugural media monitoring service.

Dave Mance, in leather jacket, taught me Hyperlocal before it was an Internet business model

Applying the knowledge absorbed early in life is not always obvious.

Case in point, I was too busy having fun as a 16-year-old DJ at tiny Dansville, NY, radio station WDNY-AM to truly grasp how owner Dave Mance was keeping his overhead low and his customers in sharp focus.

Sure, I knew that the start-up shared office space with local real estate man Tom Wamp, and that I was only making $3 an hour to do weekend air shifts. I also realized that Dave didn’t own many vinyl 45 RPM records, instead relying on oldies he borrowed and copied onto dozens of reel-to-reel audio tapes.

In 1978, I was too young and inexperienced in business to understand that Dave was simply being prudent after spending every last cent for an FCC license, transmitter, antenna, turntables, tape decks, mixing boards and other gear needed to get his station on the air. He was a human chameleon – morning show DJ, newsman, sales manager and bathroom cleaner – and his wife and two others were the only full-time employees.

The penny-pinching aspects of running his tiny broadcast enterprise didn’t damper the staff’s enthusiasm.  We were celebrities as we did live “remotes” from car dealerships and the village’s annual Dogwood Festival.  The lack of a local newspaper allowed us to be the authority on things like obituaries, which were sponsored by the Chamberlain Funeral Home and aired during the noon  news.

The cash flow from WDNY allowed Dave to add an FM station in Dansville, purchase additional radio properties in another remote southern New York community — the Delaware County village of Sidney — and in the city of Watertown, 70 miles north of Syracuse.

I had not seen or spoken with Dave Mance for 30 years when I caught up with him in the picturesque Thousand Islands on Thursday night.  While he had sold most of his radio stations three years ago, his status as a small-market media magnate meant he knew virtually everyone in town and enjoyed prestige, like acting as emcee for the Clayton Antique Boat Show.

Spending an evening with Dave in Alexander Bay brought back happy memories of being a big fish in a small pond.  I also realized the business lessons learned from announcing WDNY’s “McDonald’s Birthday Club” had indeed driven my judgment a decade later at PR Newswire.

Seemingly niche businesses like Dan Forbush’s nerdy academic experts service on CompuServe, ProfNet, were fascinating to me — not because of the size of his pre-Web social network but because of focus, uniqueness and the resulting fanatical loyalty of his customers .  Dan owned a niche in the same way our tiny radio station commanded respect, and a bit of cash, in Dansville. PRN bought ProfNet in 1996.

Even with all of today’s media fragmentation and demographic challenges, Dave’s stations in Dansville and Sidney continue to defy national trends by embracing a business model now known in Internet circles as hyperlocal (see Max Kalehoff’s interesting post on the definition of hyperlocal) Broadcasting play-by-play of local high school hockey and football games might only attract a few hundred listeners and minimal revenue, but the consumer loyalty among players’ families and community leaders is priceless.

The GPS-driven localization applications on my iPhone are doing their best to mimic the successes experienced by small-town media properties.  For these local media disruptors to persevere, their citizen journalist contributors will need to do much more than restaurant and bar reviews.  Yelp, Buzzd,  Prximity and Google Local, we’re waiting for you to show up at the Dogwood Festival and soccer game before we annoint you king of neighborhood media.

Scores of Americans who live outside of metropolitan areas lost some good friends in June. And they weren’t Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.

The companions who disappeared on June 12 ranged from Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White and Pat Zajac to Providence, R.I., television weatherman R.J. Heim.

They were the personalities on channels 2 through 13 and, for homes not served by cable TV, they disappeared permanently when VHF stations turned off their old transmitters and began sending out a less powerful digital signal on the UHF band.

It wasn’t until this week that I got to experience first-hand the impact of the federal government DTV decision requiring television stations to abandon the channels on which they have been broadcasting since the 1950s. I was shocked at how even tech-savvy homeowners could not coax the new digital signals into their TV sets.

The “South County” region of Rhode Island is not rural America, by many standards.  Located just 35 miles south of Providence, the county has numerous year-round communities — like Wakefield and Narragansett  — as well as summer vacation havens for beachgoers.  At the local Radio Shack outlet, a sales associate admitted that more than half the digital television antennas sold were being returned because it was impossible to receive the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates that had previously supplied area residents
with news, weather, sports and entertainment.

I had planned ahead for our summer sojourn by buying a $59 device to convert digital broadcasts into an analog signal that our cottage’s 1980s-era TV set could display.  When the box did not find any signals powerful enough, I bought a $35 amplified digital antenna. That maneuver succeeded in locating four undesirable channels run by the bankrupt media organization formerly known as Paxson, perhaps best known for its religious and home-shopping networks.  Still no luck finding the mainstay Providence stations.

Failure of the recommended consumer solutions meant taking this technical challenge into the capable hands of several neighborhood macho men, all well-versed in building and repairing electronics.

We attached to a mast a commercial-grade UHF antenna that looked like some sort of Cold War military apparatus and hoisted it above the rafters of our beach cottage.  Then we employed a smart phone application that provides a digital compass so we could aim the antenna directly at the television transmission towers we were targeting, using http://antennaweb.org to get the precise coordinates.

After we wasted several quality vacation hours that should have been used consuming beers and absorbing UV rays on the beach, we determined that Narragansett, Rhode Island, population 16,361 at the 2000 census, is a television black hole for those without subscriptions to cable or satellite services.

If it’s this bad in New England, I can only imagine how challenging it will be to serve off-the-grid citizens in the rural South, Great Plains and other regions.  Suddenly, it seems likely that media bad boy Michael Wolff was correct in April when he predicted that the big three TV networks would soon have audiences no larger than a mid-sized metro daily newspaper.

Embracing new media technologies has been a defining characteristic of my professional life.  Yet I find it distasteful when government and industry turn their back on consumers who made older media successful.  Forced upgrades are fine, as long as they work just as well as legacy systems and the financial investment in modernizing is not too steep.

This digital TV conversion was characterized as an upgrade when it actually leaves millions of formerly loyal viewers, outside the regions served by insufficient UHF signals, with a choice of a monthly cable or satellite bill or no service at all.

I wasn’t born yet when World War II was fought.   Yet I’ve seen plenty of newsreels and movies about the lives of terrified Europeans who fled into bomb shelters when the sirens began wailing.

That was the atmosphere I expected to encounter in New Orleans this week when editors, publishers, webmasters and other online staffers from the financially battered news industry gathered for the annual Interactive Media conference.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Magazine Publishers of America each canceled their 2009 gatherings due to industry layoffs, cuts to T&E budgets and corporate travel bans.  Nielsen Events, however, bravely marched forward and allowed its Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek brands to hold their shared conference, a decidedly scaled-down affair punctuated by the EPpy Awards honors for best media-affiliated Web sites.

While nothing can match the terror suffered by the poor souls huddled in the dank, underground caverns beneath London, Paris and Rotterdam in the 1930s and ’40s, the somber mood exhibited by a good number of attendees at the New Orleans conference nonetheless conjured up images of people who know their professional lives are under attack — and that their careers may not survive.

Some takeaways, listed in no particular order:

Politico is providing very creative cash, barter or ad sales alternatives to news organizations that want to close their DC bureaus while still maintaining coverage of their state or specific Congressional districts.  This is also big competition for AP.  Despite its public image as a disruptive new model, Politico biz dev VP Roy  Schwartz admits the company makes more money from its 33,000-circ printed newspaper than from online.

Newspapers owners who think their dailies’ Web sites will maintain their influence and traffic after shuttering the print product are wrong.  SeattlePI.com traffic has tanked since the Post-Intelligencer ceased publishing.  The Detroit Free Press experiment — stopping home delivery on some days — has not yet been rated a success or failure, though VP Paul Anger admitted advertisers are not yet making Web-only buys.

AP lacked any transformational news that the market seemed to be craving.  Other than a pitch for its mobile product and talking about ways the agency is trying to reduce its cost base — like scaling back to four regional news centers in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and Phoenix — the hottest revelation was that subscribers should be salivating to see a new AP county-by-county interactive graphic to track federal stimulus spending.

ThomsonReuters flew in from Germany MD Christoph Pleitgen to show a video montage of Reuters images and to take a few verbal stabs at AP’s Kate Butler by saying Reuters is “relaxed” about unpaid use of its content by third parties.  Pleitgen acknowledged that Reuters.com will continue to be a competitor to its subscribers because it sells ads and competes for audience with its public site.

Freda Yarbrough, new media director for 2theadvocate.com, made everyone in the audience chat with their table mates about their favorite New Orleans restaurants and talked about growing up in a state that perenially showed up as No. 49 on every list.  Her only solace was that Mississippi was last.

Digg’s reminded those who planned to erect pay walls around their content that their brand would be absent from sites like Digg, Google and Twitter if each click results in a “sign up now” box.  VP Bob Buch pointed to a WSJ.com policy of making the first click free, so Wall Street Journal articles on Digg are fully readable.

Andrew Sollinger of Financial Times gave new meeting to CPM (Colluding on the Price of Media) while on a panel with CNNmoney.com GM Jonathan Shar.  “Stick to pricing. We have to hold firm,” were the exact words.  Time for a sit-down with the general counsel when he gets back to New York.

Scant English-language foreign news coverage from certain regions — Indonesia and Brazil, for example  — is the niche globalpost wants to own, said Executive Editor and VP Charlie Sennott.  He described a paid content model in which subscribers would get professionally written news from veteran foreign correspondents who know longer work for major U.S. news organizations.  A $200 annual “Passport” will also allow subscribers to interact with the writers and to suggest story ideas, which will be voted on in a form of controlled crowd-sourcing.

The man who used to launched WSJ Online and, more recently, ran Yahoo! News has resurfaced at a personalized news startup called DailyMe.  Neil Budde differentiated from the conference antichrist, Newser’s Michael Wolff, by saying DailyMe would license content rather than simply scraping and linking.

Perhaps the saddest part of the conference should have been the most joyous.  During the EPpy Awards ceremony, it felt like more than half of the winners weren’t in the room to accept the trophies, and some had been laid off.  They hadn’t made it to the fallout shelter in time.