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.

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!