I grew up in one of the seemingly small number of Rochester families without a relative employed by Kodak.

But that doesn’t mean the once-mighty photographic empire didn’t touch my life. Kodak’s expected bankruptcy filing conjured up memories of sight, sound and even smell.

Anyone who lived in western New York in the 1970s and ‘80s likely remembers the spike in print and broadcast automobile advertising in March when the more than 50,000 Kodak workers cashed their annual “Kodak Bonus” check. The jingle “Piehler, Piehler, the Pontiac Dealer” still echoes in my brain.

Unfortunately, the stench of Kodak wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the Piehler jingle. Smokestacks near Kodak Park spewed acrid plumes and rained gritty particulate onto cars parked downwind.

As a teenage ice cream truck driver, I’d leave my car parked near the Lake and Ridgeway Skippy Ice Cream depot for long periods. The “Kodak rain” prompted plenty of pollution conspiracy theories – and hose downs of our cars. Around that same period, high levels of carcinogenic chemicals were detected in the ground water on nearby Rand Street.

One thing Kodak did very well – in addition to manufacturing film, batteries, copy machines and, more recently, inkjet printers — was generating news.

As the Rochester reporter for UPI, I was on the receiving end of many press releases produced by Kodak’s formidable media relations operation and blue chip PR firms like Hill & Knowlton. While most of the “news” was far from time-sensitive, Kodak’s quarterly earnings announcements were of critical importance.

Because Kodak was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other key indexes in those days, the financial newswires like Dow Jones and Reuters routinely issued a headline within seconds of the NYSE:EK release crossing PR Newswire or Business Wire.

But the secretary in Kodak’s PR department openly complained about lengthy service delays at the commercial newswires. Her solution to make sure market-moving news was quickly delivered to the Democrat & Chronicle, Times-Union and Rochester TV and radio stations was to assemble a line-up of taxicabs outside Kodak Office on State Street.

So that’s where I stood on the mornings Kodak issued its earnings. As Joan Miller delivered envelopes to the cabbies, I ran with the press release to a bank of pay phones at Kodak headquarters and called in the earnings numbers to UPI’s financial editor, Dottie Brooks.  By 1985, I was using my first laptop computer — a Radio Shack TRS80 Model 100, complete with an acoustic cup modem — to write Kodak earnings stories.  

Beating AP, Dow Jones and Reuters consistently on breaking news from Kodak was an obsession.

A defining moment in my relationship with Kodak came after a federal judge ruled that Kodak had infringed Polaroid’s patents in the creation of a Kodak instant camera. My editor at UPI, Steve Geimann, jazzed up the headline: “Kodak Convicted of Stealing Polaroid Trade Secrets.” The comms guy at Kodak, Charlie Smith, went too far in expressing his displeasure over the headline. A bridge was burned.

From that day on, I shot Fuji film.

I grew up during Rochester’s Top 40 wars as a WAXC groupie.

When I couldn’t find the weekly hit list next to the 45s at Duke Spinner’s or Neisner’s, I picked up a copy in person at the Channel 10 building on East Avenue or, later, at 50 Chestnut Plaza.

Program directors Larry White and Bob Scott tolerated my nerdiness and allowed me to hang around — first answering the request lines and later running the board during the Sunday morning God Squad shift (and American Top 40!).  I was 14 when I trekked to the FCC’s offices in Buffalo to take the test for a third-class certificate, allowing me to run the 5,000-watt WAXC transmitter.

My on-air debut occurred during summer school recess, when I was in the WAXC newsroom volunteering my services as the kid who makes calls to police agencies looking for juicy stories.  The newsroom CB radio crackled to life about a car crash in the infamous Can of Worms highway interchange east of downtown Rochester and I ran a note into Bob Scott, who was doing afternoon drive.  Rather than reading the item himself, Bob found a helicopter sound effect, told me to hop on a telephone and pretended I was “Dandy Dave in the Beanie Copter.”  The chopper was phony but the traffic information was real – and my radio career was born.

Doing morning and afternoon traffic reports on WAXC and its successor, WWWG, was a dream job for a 14-year-old kid.  Having my crackly adolescent voice mocked occasionally was part of the fun – especially when DJs like Springer Jones, Dan “Money in the Morning” Money and Tom Keller were doing the ribbing.

My move to WHAM and WHFM happened at the ripe old age of 15, thanks to program director Jack Murphy.  I worked morning drive with the “world’s tallest midget” Jack Slattery and the dean of farm radio George Haefner, and Maggie Brooks and Bill Lower were our news anchors.  After Jack Murphy, other WHAM talent of the era included Dave Laird, Paul Trembley, Mike Harvey and Chet Walker.

As if being the on-air traffic reporter at the top-rated radio station wasn’t good enough, another big career break happened in 1978 when Mark Frank, the local reporter for United Press International, wrote a feature story.  The lead focused on me being too young to drive a car while, at the same time, directing tens of thousands of drivers each day. Mark’s article got lots of play and I relished the attention.

To this day, I have wonderful memories of riding my bicycle from the Browncroft neighborhood, through deserted pre-dawn streets, to WAXC and WHAM.  The day mob boss Sammy Gingello was rubbed out, I heard the explosion, went back to sleep and, hours later, pedaled past the crater outside Ben’s Café Society at Stilson and East Main streets.  These are not storybook childhood memories, but they contributed to my career in journalism and business – and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

This weekend, I head back to Rochester for a reunion of the city’s radio industry professionals.  I am very lucky to have been a part of the business.  Thank you to everyone who made it possible.

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.

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.