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.

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.

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.