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.