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.

Photo credit: Sony Pictures

Actor Abe Vigoda knows what it’s like to be dead even while still very much alive and kicking.

Known best for his roles as Sgt. Fish on the 1970s TV sitcom Barney Miller and Sal Tessio in The Godfather, Vigoda has been prematurely killed off by People magazine and dozens of other media outlets.

It’s the same “dead before my time” syndrome suffered by the lowly press release.

In 2006, the technology and media blogger Tom Foremsky declared the press release dead on his Silicon Valley Watcher blog.  His post started a useful discussion about social media, and the introduction of disruptive products from both legacy and new service providers.  PR professionals who understood the new paradigm also began to accept the fact that the era of command-and-control communications would be replaced by a more open dialog, in which consumers shared the stage with powerful brands.

So what’s the condition of the press release five years later?

In short: very healthy, but less profitable for the legacy market leaders. In the five years since Foremsky’s death declaration, millions of releases have been posted to web sites to be indexed by Google and other search engines, pushed via email and RSS feeds to media and other audiences, and transmitted by both free and paid distribution services.

Not only has this mainstay tool of professional communicators not succumb, it has bulked up beyond text to include photos, video and social sharing features.

The two largest commercial newswire services, Business Wire and PR Newswire, have seen a stabilization in press release volumes – which were as high as 200,000 releases a year each at their peak — after a decline driven by regulatory changes, the recession and increased competition from Marketwire, NASDAQ, Thomson Reuters and Vocus.

A revenue-sapping trend affecting each of these commercial newswire services is a phenomenon some have dubbed Web FD — a relaxation of disclosure regulations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that allows publicly traded companies to post their material news on their web site, as long as they have told their key audiences how they intend to circulate news.

The list of companies that once paid hefty fees to Business Wire, NASDAQ’s Globe NewsWire, Marketwire and PR Newswire but that now self-disclose includes Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT),  General Motors (NYSE: GM), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), Marathon Oil (NYSE: MRO), Expedia Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE), Tellabs Inc. (NASDAQ: TLAB),  BGC Partners (NASDAQ: BGCP), SVB Financial Group (NASDAQ: SIVB), Investors Real Estate Trust (NASDAQ: IRET), and Steinway Musical Instruments, Inc. (NYSE: LVB).

Also cutting into the highly profitable regulatory segment of the press release business is a relatively new offering from Thomson Reuters, which hosts the investor relations websites and streams the quarterly earnings conference calls for thousands of public companies.  After the acquisition of the little-known Norwegian financial news distribution company Hugin Online, Thomson Reuters began offering its clients a low-cost disclosure service – pitching it as a way to cut Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire out of IR budgets.

While this bloody battle rages for hundreds of millions of dollars in press release distribution revenue associated with disclosure of market-moving news from public companies, the highest growth in release volume is coming from marketers and small business owners.

One only need listen to the quarterly investor conference call of PR software maker Vocus for proof that sales and volume growth are exceptionally strong.  Vocus bought PR Web in 2006 and has registered steady gains by posting non-regulatory content from marketers and small business owners.

Unlike Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire, PR Web relies principally on SEO rather than the expense of maintaining a global network of feeds into newsrooms and paying distribution infrastructure companies like Acquire Media and The Associated Press.  Because the issuers of press releases via PR Web don’t care that their release doesn’t arrive at the Bloomberg newsdesk at precisely the same second as it gets to The Wall Street Journal, pricing is substantially lower.

Another selling point that appears to resonate with customers of PR Web are access report demonstrating page views, click-throughs, sharing, pickup and other data.  While Business Wire, Globe Newswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire each offer some level of post-release reporting to issuers, the data is incomplete because the newswires cannot track interactions with the content on third party sites (like Yahoo Finance).

Among management at the major newswires, there is a strong desire to expand from PR and IR to the marketing communications departments at larger enterprises, and into small- and medium-sized businesses, as a hedge against declines in regulatory release revenue:

• PR Newswire is a gold sponsor at this week’s Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland.

• GlobeNewswire has started distributing releases for customers of Cision, who can now build and distribute to a custom media list and also send their content over CisionWire.

• Business Wire sells an SEO service called EON – Enhanced Online News as a standalone while including the feature in other wire distribution circuits.

Watch for both scrappy entrepreneurs and larger players to bring new services to the distribution market in the months ahead.

On the scrappy end of the spectrum, tiny Wyoming-based PitchEngine (where I have acted as an adviser for some time) continues to enhance its social media release platform and forge partnerships so the technology is available to a broader set of customers.

A larger player, the fast-growing Meltwater Group, based in San Francisco, already sells its Buzz, News, Press and Reach products to the PR sector. I’d be surprised if a distribution product was not on the way.

There are undoubtedly others making inroads into a crowded market that shows no signs of taking Tom Foremsky’s advice.  Let me know what you are seeing out there.

Disruptive digital media businesses has long been a passion for me.   Below is the release noodls wrote when I joined the board.

GENOA, ITALY ‐ January 27, 2011 ‐ noodls.com, the first global aggregator of official information in real‐time, today announced the appointment of former PR Newswire President and COO David Armon to its Board of Directors, effective January 31.

Armon, 47, has 23 years’ experience in the PR industry, with specific focus on press release distribution.

“Dave will bring vertical expertise to our Board to help accelerate our penetration on the distribution side with a focus on the U.S. market.  We are especially pleased to have a new member with Dave’s credentials, industry standing and business experience on our Board,” noted noodls Chairman and CEO Giacomo Cambiaso.

“Dave brings us a range of skills and expertise gained not only as a senior manager and leader, but in such areas as sales, marketing and product and business development.  This is an important time for noodls,” said Cambiaso, “as we continue to pursue our revenue and positioning strategy to enhance shareholder value. Dave will be a valuable asset and play a key role in providing important strategic guidance as we focus on our presence in the U.S. We welcome Dave to the Board and look forward to his counsel as we pursue our goal of fulfilling the potential we created for noodls over the past three years.”

Armon, based in New York, was president of PR Newswire from 2004 to 2008.  He started with the company in 1989 as Cleveland Bureau manager, becoming vice president, Midwest Region in 1993; senior vice president, Sales in 1998; and president, Americas in 2001.As president of the leading U.S. press release distributor, Armon acted as a business development executive, forging marketing alliances, joint ventures, product extensions, acquisitions and disposals. He also led broad expansion of PR Newswire services to include social media, video, international and multicultural distribution and launched the industry’s first use of Facebook and Twitter.

Subsequent to leaving PR Newswire, Armon was a corporate board member of social media monitoring pioneer Techrigy and advised the group through its acquisition by Alterian in August 2009.  His next board post, for the PR and social media software provider dna13, also resulted in the sale of the company, to CNW Group, in April 2010.

In 2010, Armon started advising NASDAQ OMX on issues involving PR and IR services for the global marketplace and players.

A key focus for Armon throughout his career has been counseling the issuers of news on best practices to broaden the reach of their often market‐moving and time‐sensitive information.“Investors and other key stakeholders will benefit as noodls aggregates content that was previously very challenging to find,” said Armon. “I believe noodls has the potential to be a powerful force in the global disclosure, distribution and information markets.”

Armon has a BA in journalism from Utica College of Syracuse University in New York.  He has been active in the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, the Public Relations Society of America and the National Investor Relations Institute.

About noodls

noodls is the first global aggregator of official information in real‐time.  The mission of this fast‐ growing, VC‐backed global startup is to introduce a new distribution channel aggregating in real‐ time all the corporate communications of the world to overcome the limitations of the traditional disclosure practice for the benefit of media organizations, financial markets and PR/IR professionals. Thanks to an innovative technology and business model, noodls is able to capture the voices of the leading organizations of the world and make them available to the media and markets. Every day, noodls distributes +13,000 press releases, company announcements and corporate news issued by +30,000 leading organizations from 160 countries and 84 financial markets.

For more information, go to www.noodls.com

It’s never easy for a corporation to introduce products that, if successful, could jeopardize the core business.  

Kodak’s Steve Sasson was heralded as the inventor of the digital camera, way back in 1975 in my hometown of Rochester, NY. But management at the Big Yellow Box weren’t about to threaten a global imaging business that relied on the manufacture of silver-coated film and processing of that film with chemicals made by Kodak. The executives in charge buried Sasson’s achievement and prayed they could earn their bonuses and retire before digital pictures toppled their empire.

Blockbuster honchos made similar decisions by not embracing the mail-and web-based Netflix or kiosk-based Redbox business models

In my own career in the commercial newswire market, it was clear as early as 1990 that alternatives to the transactions models used by PR Newswire and Business Wire would someday gain steam.  Former stock analyst Tad LaFountain introduced a dial-up service called CDX, Corporate Data Exchange, for corporations to post their releases, on a subscription basis, for the investment community, journalists, students and others who dialed in using their snazzy Hayes 1200-baud modem. 

While CDX never took off, the race was on for our team at PRN to broaden our product offering and double down on customer service to gird against an anticipated tidal wave of players and playbooks for conducting PR and IR.  Surprisingly, even today, the vast majority of public companies continue to rely on BW, PRN, Marketwire and the NASDAQ OMX service GlobeNewswire to facilitate real-time disclosure of their market-moving news to financial news services, print, broadcast and trade media, and the many Internet information portals that serve investors and the social web. 

Sure, there has been plenty of hot air over the impending demise of a paid distribution model that dates back to 1954.  CCBN promised to take out the commercial newswires, as has ThomsonReuters, the company that acquired the investor relations website hosting firm.  Then, former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox foisted extensible business reporting language on mega-caps and early reporters. And the SEC ‘s “web FD” interpretive guidance  (PDF) of August 2008 cleared the way for companies to disclose via their web sites and a filing to EDGAR. 

But there’s been nothing in the investor relations disclosure and distribution space as revolutionary — cheap and easy to use – as a subscription to Netflix or a Redbox machine stocked with the latest videos on Blu-ray. 

Thankfully, the opposite is true for non-regulatory announcements, the product introductions, events, promotions and other content issued by marketing and PR departments at large and small organizations.   Innovation has been rampant in the PR services arena for the past couple of years.

It’s such a dynamic market these days that I don’t even mind being branded “official suit” as the by PitchEngine founder and CEO Jason Kintzler, who invited me to join the organization as a strategic advisor last week.

I’ve been tweeting, Skyping and emailing with Jason for a few years. At last year’s PRSA international conference in San Diego, Jason invited attendees to his booth (a living room couch and coffee table) to see a unique subscription model that allowed issuers of news to build their own optimized multimedia page with just a few mouse clicks.

When I needed to generate media interest in a good New Year’s story last December – the “gourmet” soup kitchen where my wife is the volunteer sous chef received a donation of expensive caviar — I used PitchEngine  and scored massive coverage (video).  I was hooked.

So now, as the suit, I’m the only guy choking in a neckwear  on the “About PitchEngine” page.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Jason’s dog, Maddie, is wearing a collar. 

Even with sea gulls circling, waves crashing and the smell of suntan lotion providing delicious distractions, it still takes a few days for vacationing PR and IR executives to force their brains into vacation mode.

Visiting the Narragansett, RI, Dollar Tree location was meant to be a simple stock-up for provisions missing from our beach cottage.  Instead, it turned into a bizarre “what if?” exercise about the brands we knew and loved when corporate communications was a simpler business.

Walking through the discount retailer’s aisles was like visiting a brand graveyard and exhuming familiar products that conjure up powerful memories.

Mallo Cup and Charleston Chew feature prominently in the candy selection.  In the breakfast aisle, Kellogg’s hasn’t paid a premium to occupy prime real estate, so shoppers get to experience Toast ‘Em breakfast pastries rather than Pop Tarts.

Remember when Lavoris stood proudly among Listerine and Scope as a leading mouthwash? Or when Bugles corn chips commanded the same respect as Fritos.

If Dollar Tree was a B2B supermarket offering steeply discounted services that still worked fine, but lacked advertising support or the latest technology update, what brands would we find?

Thick, phonebook-sized directories figured prominently in our industry a decade or two ago. IR officers religiously thumbed through the Nelson’s directory of analysts while the PR function carefully guarded their Bacon’s book of media contacts.  They’d definitely appear in the PR/IR dollar store.

Some of the earliest digital tools would be on the shelves, too.  The Reuters-owned Inc.Link product was the first generation of what we know today as the IR web site.  PR Newswire morphed Inc.Link into Virtual IQ, which Thomson then turned into its competitor to CCBN.

Streetfusion was another oldie but goodie, publishing a calendar of corporate earnings calls and webcasting them for investors.

Unlike consumer food and beauty products, most of the deceased PR/IR brands truthfully could not survive in a heavily discounted B2B environment equivalent to the Dollar Tree.  There are big data-gathering, fact-checking and technology costs to produce a product of high enough quality for corporate customers.

So even though Wyler’s lemonade is the powdered drink mix of choice at the Dollar Tree, it’s unlikely corporate buyers will be willing to drink the Kool-Aid offered by familiar suppliers of years gone by. Even for a buck.

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

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.

The shooting death of a Kuwaiti businessman this past weekend is a sobering reminder of how wrong things can go when misinformation is used to pump up stock prices.

Whether Hazem Khalid Al-Braikan killed himself or was murdered isn’t the point.  What is clear, no matter how the CEO of Al Raya investments died, is that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had frozen his assets because of suspicious and potentially profitable trading that occurred just before the release of news on a bogus tender offer.  (Read the full account here)

The credibility of time-sensitive, market-moving corporate news is central to the smooth operation of our global equities markets.

There’s a place for humor, such the ongoing spoof between Apple and Google on the BBspot blooper site and other venues clearly marked as parody.  But the biggest trusted providers of financial information — Dow Jones, Reuters and Bloomberg — are fighting an increasingly difficult battle to screen out bogus data from legitimate news on their closely watched platforms.

Hats off to astute newsroom staffers who rejected the fake release concerning Harmon International and Textron this past weekend, having questioned why those  NYSE -listed companies would not have issued their statements over PR Newswire or Business Wire.  Phone calls and faxed releases from Kuwait were deemed suspicious.

BW’s Neil Hershberg, a former colleague of mine at PR Newswire, noted today that we are approaching the one-year anniversary of an odd SEC statement that gave corporations the green light to experiment a bit more in the way they disclose their material news to investors.  During the past 12 months, the vast majority of companies have continued to broadcast their full-text news to the media, investors, employees, customers and other audiences via the security-obsessed commercial newswire services — ranging from industry stalwarts Business Wire and PR Newswire to Nasdaq’s Globe Newswire and the upstart Marketwire — rather than risk raising questions about the authenticity of their information.

Certainly, some innovation has taken place: 

• Ebay supplemented its use of BW with Twitter to snap highlights during the company’s quarterly conference calls
• Nasdaq-listed BGC Partners, Inc. issued a short statement over PRN saying its earnings release had just been posted to its website.  The downside of “notice-and-access “release is that investors have to take an additional step to download the company’s data, and opening additional browsers is potentially slow and cumbersome

As the C suite and investor relations officers strive to stand out from the crowd — especially when the economy begins to grow again — there will be new models and exciting ways to share information.  High atop any list of possible disclosure solutions should be the question, “Will investors trust that this information is legitimate?”