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.

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.

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From the Cartmell Funeral Home (link)

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.

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.

The whole concept of a sabbatical is foreign to those of us who haven’t worked in academia. For someone who bought his first police scanner at age 14 and who has measured time in news cycles ever since, taking a pause to refresh was heresy.

Yet I found myself on “garden leave” – the term the British use to describe the time a departing executive is dormant before getting back to work –for much of 2009. The irony is that the only thing resembling a garden at our New York condo is a window box. Despite the lack of a plot to plant, I can honestly say the last few months have been exhilarating.

While I thought my work-life balance was in check before, now I actually know my daughters’ shoe sizes and the menu at the soup kitchen where my wife, Maureen, cooks gourmet meals three days a week. I also experienced the joy of mentoring two recent City University graduates, and helping low-income women gain self-sufficiency through a highly effective program called First Step.

On the networking front, I have been awed by all the brilliant entrepreneurs who are introducing fascinating and disruptive ways to do tasks that have long confounded marketing and PR pros. In private equity and venture capital, I have new respect for the discipline and guts it takes to find, fund and execute. And on the customer desktop, I share your pain that it’s possible to order a pizza through your Tivo but automating a MarCom department remains but a dream.

Today, as I prepare to begin a new chapter as a board member and vice chairman of dna13, I want to thank the many friends, peers and complete strangers who embodied the very spirit of social networking by brainstorming, opening their Rolodexes and challenging my preconceived notions about how PR, media, marketing and sales are intersecting, and the role that technology will play in that convergence.

Most people have never heard of dna13. Compared to an entrenched giant like PR Newswire, this Ottawa-based software company is very, very small. Yet dna13 is a wonderful example of how someone who’s an expert in his job – dna13 founder Chris Johnson worked in corporate communications for Bell Canada – can bring a fresh solution to market and watch it grow.

What does dna13 do? In short, users of dna13 software can listen to what is being said about their company across all channels — print, major market TV, online and social media. When the SM (social media) or MSM (mainstream media) hits the fan, the dna13 platform has cool permissioning features so subscribers can securely align team members to plan the synchronized delivery of messages. (Note: those who love managing their 500+ Google Alerts, emailing multiple “track changes” documents to their CEO, or plugging their good, bad and neutral hits into a spreadsheet should not look at dna13.)

dna13 is moving from entrepreneurial to growth phase. Because it’s set up in the Software-as-a-Service model, product development is nimble. I have never seen a better technology organization – moving from white board to production in days and weeks rather than months and years.

My new colleagues include seasoned sales, marketing and product people, super-capable COO Kevin O’Neil, as well as board support from software veteran Howard Gwin (PeopleSoft, IBM, Pivotal), Tom Birch of Propulsion Ventures, Inc. and Pierre-Andre Meunier of Celtic House Venture Partners.

To all those who invited me into their homes, offices, industry events and social networks during my transition, please know that I’m happy to repay the favor. Just say the word.

Most Americans associate summer’s three-day bank holidays with barbecues, trips to the beach and  family vacations.

I think of corpses.

Not that I am morbid or have a desire to work as an undertaker.  I simply had a recurring assignment early in my journalistic career to keep track of fatal car accidents on New York state highways each Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day weekend.  And I had fun doing it.

Working out of United Press International bureaus in Rochester and Buffalo in the 1980s, I was the only staffer on duty  between New York City and Cleveland Sunday mornings.  My task was to scan newspapers and check in with UPI’s stringer network — friendly news people at local TV and radio stations  across the Empire State — for the day’s top stories.   UPI paid $40 per story, though the company’s numerous bankrupcty filings made the promise of receiving a non-rubber stringer check a running joke.

On the long  holiday weekends, UPI’s state and national wires  kept a tally of the number of people killed in auto wrecks.  We called this the CAX count, an acronym that meant something like car accidents or casualties.   The National Safety Council, an advocate for seatbelt use, would make a prediction about how many unfortunate drivers, passengers and pedestrians would expire between midnight Friday and the end of travel period on Monday.

Vincent Toffany, who headed the safety council, understood that the news cycle was typically very slow on these weekends.  His organization received branding and reinforcement of their messaging.  The American Automobile Association used this release-news-when-it’s dead approach, too, as did gasoline price survey author Trilby Lundberg.

What used to infuriate UPI’s archrival, The Associated Press, is when our prowess on the telephones with state police or stringers would yield an extra victim or two.  In some cases, UPI would be a tad liberal by counting a drunk who died by falling off a highway overpass or the victim of a pre-holiday crash who succumbed after the clock struck midnight.  AP usually relied on “electronic carbon” stories from its member newspapers, which meant AP broadcast subscribers in New York got late, stale news.

In any event, the UPI totals got a helluva lot more airtime and print coverage because I had a higher CAX count every time.

With UPI a shell of its old self — it’s now owned by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its News World Corporation, publisher of the Washington Times — and Reuters and Bloomberg doing a nice job with international and business news, there’s little traditional wire service competition for AP in the United States.  But demand for content among local print and broadcast outlets is down, too, as they lose audience and advertisers to an increasingly fragmented online media landscape.

The Associated Press still makes a significant amount of money off its 50 state reports, thanks to correspondents covering legislative news in statehouse bureaus and a policy not to display the content online, where it could be pirated.  But a reduction in the size of AP’s editorial staff and similar news cutbacks among media outlets that used to feed items to AP, has left huge holes in coverage.

What’s filling the gap? Regional newspapers are banding together to form cooperatives that may make even AP state reports unnecessary in the years ahead.  The Ohio News Organization is one such effort.   Politico also represents a significant threat, as it readily barters editorial coverage of Washington news for advertising inventory in local media outlets and web sites.

There are also some dark horses in coverage of the nuts-and-bolts local news.  Atlanta-based CNN has its own editorial staff plus a large network of domestic radio and television affiliates that both broadcast content from and contribute news to CNN.  The so-called CNN Wire has not yet become a comprehensive state-level news service, but it could.

Not surprisingly, newcomers without legacy business hindrances seem to be doing a fine job breaking news locally and globally.   The micro-local Watertown, NY, site Newzjunky is kicking the digital ass of the century-old Watertown Daily Times and making money by selling advertising.

Twitter is the no-cost platform through which the Dutch news service Breaking News Online reaches the majority of its 1.1 million followers, though it is also emailing and using RSS.  In a short time, BNO has gone from solely aggregating third-party news content in under 140 characters to a growing amount of original reporting.  While there’s no apparent revenue model, it wouldn’t surprise me to see local, state, national and vertical beats pop up under the BNO brand as consumers get hooked on digesting tweets and SMS headlines.

The word “wire” is less about a strand of copper these days.  I think of it as an acronym — World Instantly Reached Electronically — and relish the fact that so many content producers are joining in the fun.