Scores of Americans who live outside of metropolitan areas lost some good friends in June. And they weren’t Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.

The companions who disappeared on June 12 ranged from Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White and Pat Zajac to Providence, R.I., television weatherman R.J. Heim.

They were the personalities on channels 2 through 13 and, for homes not served by cable TV, they disappeared permanently when VHF stations turned off their old transmitters and began sending out a less powerful digital signal on the UHF band.

It wasn’t until this week that I got to experience first-hand the impact of the federal government DTV decision requiring television stations to abandon the channels on which they have been broadcasting since the 1950s. I was shocked at how even tech-savvy homeowners could not coax the new digital signals into their TV sets.

The “South County” region of Rhode Island is not rural America, by many standards.  Located just 35 miles south of Providence, the county has numerous year-round communities — like Wakefield and Narragansett  — as well as summer vacation havens for beachgoers.  At the local Radio Shack outlet, a sales associate admitted that more than half the digital television antennas sold were being returned because it was impossible to receive the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates that had previously supplied area residents
with news, weather, sports and entertainment.

I had planned ahead for our summer sojourn by buying a $59 device to convert digital broadcasts into an analog signal that our cottage’s 1980s-era TV set could display.  When the box did not find any signals powerful enough, I bought a $35 amplified digital antenna. That maneuver succeeded in locating four undesirable channels run by the bankrupt media organization formerly known as Paxson, perhaps best known for its religious and home-shopping networks.  Still no luck finding the mainstay Providence stations.

Failure of the recommended consumer solutions meant taking this technical challenge into the capable hands of several neighborhood macho men, all well-versed in building and repairing electronics.

We attached to a mast a commercial-grade UHF antenna that looked like some sort of Cold War military apparatus and hoisted it above the rafters of our beach cottage.  Then we employed a smart phone application that provides a digital compass so we could aim the antenna directly at the television transmission towers we were targeting, using http://antennaweb.org to get the precise coordinates.

After we wasted several quality vacation hours that should have been used consuming beers and absorbing UV rays on the beach, we determined that Narragansett, Rhode Island, population 16,361 at the 2000 census, is a television black hole for those without subscriptions to cable or satellite services.

If it’s this bad in New England, I can only imagine how challenging it will be to serve off-the-grid citizens in the rural South, Great Plains and other regions.  Suddenly, it seems likely that media bad boy Michael Wolff was correct in April when he predicted that the big three TV networks would soon have audiences no larger than a mid-sized metro daily newspaper.

Embracing new media technologies has been a defining characteristic of my professional life.  Yet I find it distasteful when government and industry turn their back on consumers who made older media successful.  Forced upgrades are fine, as long as they work just as well as legacy systems and the financial investment in modernizing is not too steep.

This digital TV conversion was characterized as an upgrade when it actually leaves millions of formerly loyal viewers, outside the regions served by insufficient UHF signals, with a choice of a monthly cable or satellite bill or no service at all.

Being politically correct is not working in New York politics.

I am not surprised but terribly disappointed that the Empire State’s legally blind, African American governor, David Paterson, is being vilified by right and left, black and white, poor and rich.

“Paterson’s so low, Spitzer looks good,” read Tuesday’s front-page headline in the free New York City commuter daily Metro.

For those who are not riveted by the antics of Albany, Paterson became governor abruptly in March 2008 when the testosteronally overcharged Eliot Spitzer resigned after getting caught with a call girl. A veteran pol whose father has been a fixture in the state’s Democratic party since the 1950s, Paterson had time for neither formal media training nor staff vetting when he was thrust onto center stage.

The results have been nothing short of a disaster for someone who has dedicated his life to public service.

The Marist College poll, reported in Metro, shows Spitzer was the preference for 51 percent of those questioned versus just 38 percent for Paterson. The question asked by pollsters was, “”Who would you rather have as governor right now?”

I don’t think I’m sticking my neck out here by saying that being man of color is not the problem. Barack Obama seems to be getting on just fine in the White House, enjoying a 68% approval after 100 days. Only two presidents in the past half century – John F. Kennedy, 83 percent, and Dwight Eisenhower, 72 percent — had a higher approval rating at this point in their presidencies.

Analysts point to a lack of strong leadership for Paterson. Yes, he embarrassed Caroline Kennedy and blabbed far too much about his decision-making process in filling the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. He has also taken flack for legislation regarding gay marriage and solving unprecedented fiscal woes, like funding New York City’s perennially mismanaged Metropolitan Transit Authority.

What no one’s saying is that Paterson shows up at every major disaster and crime scene — from the ambush of a police officer in Rochester to the murderous rampage by a suicidal immigrant in Binghamton — and that the state budget was passed just one day late. The budget was weeks or months late when Republican George Pataki was governor.

My contention is that Paterson’s public image problems relate to his blindness.

Unlike Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, New York’s governor, who was 3 months old when he suffered optic nerve damage because of an ear infection, does not hide his off-center eyes behind sunglasses. His salt-and-pepper beard contributes to an appearance uncharacteristic of Hollywood-ready governors and presidents.

With no provocation, the media has pounced on Paterson with venom usually reserved for public figures who are either prison-bound, like Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, or morally devoid but not yet convicted of being jerks.

Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen has used Paterson’s disability on a number of occasions to draw laughs as he keeps one eye closed while holding charts upside down, walking aimlessly around the set and bumping into chairs.

Sean Delonas, a cartoonist for the New York Post, depicted Paterson sitting behind a desk on which sits a framed photograph of the bumbling animated TV character Mr. Magoo. The Delonas cartoon also included a seeing-eye dog.

Paterson has had to work harder than his sighted peers to graduate from law school and achieve his professional accomplishments. There’s nothing in the LexisNexis news clipping database that portrays him as a jackass.

Yes, he has faults.

Paterson, and his wife, admitted marital infidelity. The governor, a former assistant district attorney in Queens, also talked openly about youthful cocaine use.

Coincidentally, Obama’s autobiography also chronicles his use of cocaine.

As someone who has spent my career in news and PR — including a brief stint in the state Capitol bureau of United Press International — I would love to see Paterson address the issue of media discrimination of the handicapped in a more forceful manner.

With poll numbers like these, he doesn’t have anything to lose.

(Disclosure: I serve as a volunteer member of the marketing and education committees at Lighthouse International, a 104-year-old New York-based not-for-profit agency that provides services to the blind and visually impaired. Two of my four sisters are legally blind.)

With circulations and ad sales down, staff cuts up and red ink flowing out of control, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that the coroner has official pronounced mainstream media dead.

However, only a handful of corpses, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News, have turned up at the morgue. There are still tens of thousands of dedicated, though deeply worried, employees at print, broadcast and Internet newsrooms who have yet to receive the memo that instructs that last one out to turn off the lights.

With newsstands selling newspapers, TV stations airing the six o’clock news, cable networks programming shows around the clock, and radio producers booking guests for talk shows, the public relations profession continues to define mainstream media placements as the Holy Grail.

Clearly, the more progressive PR firms and companies are using Twitter and Facebook, and communicating directly with consumers and influencers through social media. But it’s the crisis situations – like the unfortunate YouTube video by bored employees at a Domino’s pizza shop or the outrage expressed over Motrin’s mommy-sling ads – that come anywhere close to equaling the giant audience delivered by mainstream media.

At PR firms across the world, smiling and dialing, pitching and bitching, continue at this very moment in quest of a hit on NBC’s Today Show or a CEO profile in the Toledo Blade.

But the sad fact is most “professional” communicators are not agile or spontaneous enough to take advantage of on-the-fly opportunities to garner coverage for their clients or employer.  There’s too much advance scripting of pitches, most of which are not relevant to a reporter at that moment in time, and not enough help being offered in the coverage of the big event of the day.

This week, swine flu is the hot topic. You don’t have to be the Centers for Disease Control to become part of this story.

CVS should be donating soap and paper towels to schools to promote proper hand washing.

Deloitte and Mercer should be placing their practice area experts to discuss the importance of corporate planning for heightened absenteeism.

IBM, Google and GoToMyPC.com should be talking up the fact that commerce does not have to stop in today’s age of telecommuting.

Even Hasbro and Nintendo have an angle. With students staying home in Mexico and at the Queens school hit by swine flu, parents will want to stockpile more than facemasks and antibacterial wipes. Wii, Monopoly and Scrabble seem like good choices.

Any authors of parenting books out there? Their publicists should be offering them to assignment editors today to discuss 10 tips for keeping kids calm during pandemic mania.

In short, the only reason the news hole disappears for many PR pros during big stories is because of their lack of creativity in giving the media what they need when they need it.

Recently, while judging an awards competition involving the employees of Makovsky + Company, I was impressed to hear the agency has a daily “war room” session where the media’s focus is prioritized over prepared client pitches. A number of Makovsky’s biggest hits came because they swiftly matched client experts with the media while a story was at its peak.

If swine flu does not dominate the airwaves all week, dig deep into your roster of clients to see if you can help the media cover the other biggies: Obama’s 100^th day in office, Chrysler’s likely bankruptcy and Italian wedding, Bank of America’s shareholder meeting, and how the jobless will celebrate Mother’s Day this year.

Pounce now!

Jay Richardson views The Big Bopper

Chantilly means something different to just about everyone. To my wife, a talented baker, it’s the whipped Chantilly cream she serves atop her pecan pie. Those who rely on Pepperidge Farm to cook up their desserts will know the Chantilly brand of raspberry cookie.

Then there’s the French city of Chantilly, a section of Fairfax County, Virginia, named Chantilly, and even a small neighborhood bearing that name in the city of Charlotte, N.C.

The strongest imagery for me involves The Big Bopper’s 1958 rock and roll hit Chantilly Lace, which has since been covered by dozens of bands. The opening line, “Hello, baby!” is arguably one of the most recognizable lines in rock.

The Big Bopper, aka Jiles Perry Richardson Jr., and two other young pop superstars, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, were killed in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, an event memorialized as “the day the music died” in Don McLean’s balled American Pie.

Leaping ahead nearly 50 years, a marketer with the appetite for publicity and the stomach for controversy has the opportunity to become a hero to The Big Bopper’s son, Jay Richardson, and the sponsor of a rock concert to keep his dad’s musical memory alive.

What’s the catch? Only the fact that Jay Richardson has decided the only way to fund his dream is to sell The Big Bopper’s used coffin. And he plans to do it via an eBay auction.

Jay Richardson, 49, has owned the 16-gauge steel casket since last year, when it was exhumed from Forest Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont, Texas, which just erected a large statue and memorial to the Big Bopper. The re-interment into a new casket gave the funeral industry a chance to test the quality of their circa-1950s product which, upon close inspection, stood up to 49 years of muddy entombment with only minor rust spots and lime stains.

Inside, as chronicled by Ron Franscell of the Beaumont Enterprise, “forensic examiners found the Big Bopper’s well-preserved corpse, dressed in a black suit and a blue-and-gray striped tie. He wore socks, but no shoes. Most remarkably, his thick brown hair was still perfectly coiffed in his familiar, 1950s flat-top.”
eBay has been a remarkable vehicle for marketers to acquire the oddest objects, along with plenty of media attention and the associated surge in web traffic:

– Goldenpalace.com, an online casino, paid $28,000 for a partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich auctioned by a woman who claimed an image of the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared on her lunch. In 2006, actor William Shatner sold his kidney stone to GoldenPalace.com during an auction that helped victims of Hurricane Katrina.

– Dr. Pepper Snapple Group earned an avalanche of positive media coverage, including NBC’s Today Show, this past June when it heard a Virginia hairdresser was trying to fund her wedding by auctioning off a bridesmaid spot on eBay. The beverage company and its agency, Ketchum, spent $10,000 and could very well send a celebrity bridesmaid to the April 19, 2009, nuptials.

Will a rusted casket that for nearly 50 years held the remains of The Big Bopper find a home with a familiar brand?  I’m dying to know.