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 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?”

While Batboy still lives in the form of an off-Broadway musical, I miss seeing his face on the cover of the tabloid Weekly World News, alongside the supermarket checkout counter.

Now an online publication, Weekly World News never confused its readers by trying to be anything other than off-the-charts zany.  PhD Ape and the friendly underwater Nessy-like monster known as Kraken were fictitious and fun.  It’s the same model that works well for the Onion, which still thrives as an ink-and-paper parody periodical.

Where things start to get as hairy as another Weekly World News cast member, Bigfoot, is when an organization respected for publishing the truth strays from the mission — even  in the name of comedy.  April Fool’s Day is the day the shananagans usually happen.

As a former editor of the Utica College Tangerine, I know how much fun it is to create an entire issue of phony articles, photos and ads.  But when we re-branded the weekly the Gangerine each year on April 1, we inoculated ourselves against anyone claiming they were confused over what was true and what was concocted.

Not so when a fake item — like a press release — is presented as fact.

Because the feeds of commercial wire services like PR Newswire and Business Wire are pumped directly to the hundreds of thousands of equities terminals of Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones and to media web sites, there is a great deal of anxiety about fake press releases.  Bogus content can tarnish the editorial reputation of those  media brands as well as those who issued April Fool’s releases during a lapse of judgment.

That’s the reason why hoax releases are routinely rejected, even when they are well written and presented by organizations with deep pockets and good intentions.  It’s not personal.  History has shown that a gullible public and inexperienced journalists can lead to embarrassment.

Fast food companies seem to be particularly fond of generating press through hoaxes.  In 1996, Taco Bell announced via full-page ads and a press release that it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Citizens and politicians went ballistic, saying that a national symbol of U.S. freedom should not be sold.  The restaurant chain issued a follow-up release a few hours later saying the whole story had been a practical joke.

Other fast-food and beverage chains have tried to match Taco Bell’s creativity.  Burger King routinely uses April Fool’s Day to create buzz, through full-page newspaper ads and other tactics.  One heralded the introduction of the left-handed Whopper sandwich, and another followed the Mad Cow Disease tainted beef scare and claimed the chain’s name was changing to Chicken King.

As someone who has had to reject releases submitted by PR agency execs and their eager clients, I emphasized that the individuals digesting press releases were not always able to discern fact from fiction.  Unless an issuer was willing to make it clear that the entire press release was a parody, there was a chance it would be taken seriously by an unwary consumer, investor or reporter.  The brand reputation of a newswire service was more important that the potential loss of revenue by refusing to distribute a hoax press release.

I wish I could say that every hoax story was caught before it went out.  But that would be stretching the truth.

The press secretary for the acting governor of Pennsylvania, Mark Schweiker announced on April 1, 2002, that he had changed his mind and decided to run for a full term.  The tongue-in-cheek release included clues that it was a hoax, including a campaign manager named April Phuels and a quote from Schweiker’s wife saying she did not want to leave the governor’s mansion because the bed sheets were delightfully soft.   The Schweiker release was “killed,” a newswire service term for alerting media not to use a story, within a few minutes of transmission.

Business Wire sued the individuals behind a phony 1999 press release that claimed a company called Webnode had been granted a government contract to regulate ownership of portions of the Internet.

Some pranks have proceeded without setbacks, primarily because broadcast or print outlets were willing parties to the April Fool’s jokes.  These three are courtesy of the Museum of Hoaxes:

• In 2004, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered announced that the post office had begun a new ‘portable zip codes’ program. This program, inspired by an FCC ruling that allowed phone users to take their phone number with them when they moved, would allow people to also take their zip code with them when they moved, no matter where they moved to. It was hoped that with this new program zip codes would come to ymbolize “a citizen’s place in the demographic, rather than geographic, landscape.” Assistant Postmaster General Lester Crandall was quoted as saying, “Every year millions of Americans are on the go: People who must relocate for work or other reasons. Those people may have been quite attached to their original homes or an adopted town or city of residence. For them this innovative measure will serve as an umbilical cord to the place they love best.”

• In 2000, Miller Beer announced that it had struck an agreement with the town of Marfa, Texas to become the exclusive sponsor of the phenomenon known as the Marfa Mystery Lights. These are spherical lights which appear south of the town each evening, seeming to bounce around in the sky. They’re variously rumored to be caused by ghosts, swamp gas, or uranium (though they’re probably caused by the headlights from the nearby highway). Miller announced that under the terms of the agreement the Marfa Lights would be renamed the Miller Lites. The local paper, which was in on the joke, printed the news on its front page.

• In 1999 the Savings Bank of Rockville placed an ad in the Connecticut Journal-Inquirer announcing that it would soon begin charging a $5 fee to customers who visited a live teller. The ad, which appeared on March 31, claimed that the fee was necessary in order to provide, “professional, caring and superior customer service.” Although the ad was a joke, many customers failed to recognize it as such. One woman reportedly closed her account because of it. The bank then ran a second ad revealing that the initial ad was a joke. The bank manager commented that the first ad ironically “commits us to not charging such fees.”

• In 1996, Virgin Cola announced that in the interest of consumer safety it had integrated a new technology into its cans. When the cola passed its sell-by date, the liquid would react with the metal in the can, turning the can itself bright blue. Virgin warned that consumers should therefore avoid purchasing all blue cans. The joke was that Pepsi had recently unveiled its newly designed cans. They were bright blue.