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On my desk in my office here at Money Map Press is a yellowed newspaper clipping from mid-November 1997 – a Page 1A story featuring my byline.

I've kept this clipping for all these years because it was the last big "scoop" that I got for Gannett Newspapers in Rochester – right before I left for a job here in Baltimore.

I'd been covering the corporate flailing of the once-great Eastman Kodak for nearly five years – a journalistic vision quest that took me from Upstate New York to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Japan, and even China.

The story that I broke that November was about a soon-to-be-announced corporate "restructuring" – a $1 billion, 10,000-layoff cost-cutting plan that Kodak was planning to share with Wall Streeters at a New York "event" the following Tuesday.

I didn't realize it at the time, but what I'd really written… was Kodak's epitaph.

The company's prospects had seemed much better four years earlier, after a huge shake-up at the top.

I still remember that brighter moment, when I was seated in the executive offices on the top floor of Kodak Tower in Rochester, N.Y.

Across the conference table from me was George M.C. Fisher, Kodak's just-appointed CEO and a vaunted "fix it" guy who was the first-ever outsider to lead the company.

I was there to interview Fisher. The topic on the table: the film giant's possible turnaround.