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The Steve Jobs of his era

This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some publications “must submit to destiny, and go out of existence.”

The Internet and 2009?

Nope…

The telegraph and 1845.

The editor was James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, and the great revolution was the invention of the telegraph.

The Economist has a fascinating piece on the impact of the telegraph on the newspaper business in the 1850s, and the way it changed the newspaper business.  Well worth the read.

Rather than destroy the newspaper business, as Bennett and many others predicted, it changed the newspaper business, bringing about the notion of speed.  Prior to the telegraph, news could take days, even weeks to arrive.  Telegraphs changed all that.

Everyone knows the ‘What hath God wrought’ that was the first telegraph message transmitted, but I didn’t know that ‘Have you any news’ was the second.

The telegraph ‘democratized’ news and made it available to everyone in an instant. The papers, like everyone else, had to wait at the telegraph office.

And that news had value. People were willing to pay for it, and it put the newspaper into a tumult to be the first to deliver the news.

There are two interesting lessons to be derived from this experience:

First, the telegraph companies had a sudden, technologically driven monopoly on news, yet it was one that they failed to exploit.  The mantle of news had, in an instant, passed from the newspapers to those who controlled the electronic telegraph.  They could have exploited it and we might be reading The Western Union Journal… but we aren’t.  That is because businesses and businessmen tend not to see very far beyond the part of their business that they understand.

Television broadcasters, for example, understand that they must ‘get into’ the web business in some way, but they can’t see how to do it.  What they do is business as usual, with a thin acknowledgement of the web.  They know that ‘social networks’ are important, but they think that the best way to exploit it is to ‘tweet’ things like ‘be sure to tune in at 6PM tonight’.

Not.

The irony is that the TV networks already have vast social networks – their loyal viewers.  The social network – or at least the core of it – already exists. They are all sitting there at 6pm, sometimes millions of them, doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time – watching the same show, hearing the same things, watching the same things – but each alone.

To string these people together should be relatively simple. The hard part – alignment – has already happened. But the networks, with a lifetime of experience as broadcasters, cannot fathom how to exploit this enormous opportunity.

Tragic.

The second lesson from the telegraph is that once people fixate on a goal in an industry, they have a hard time letting go of it.

Many many years ago, when I was applying for one of my first jobs, I interviewed with Lane Vernardos, who was then the Executive Producer of The CBS Evening News.

In the middle of my interview with him, in his office in the ‘fishbowl’ at CBS, a newsflash came across the wires.  Hostages who had been held on a TWA flight in Beirut were going to be released.

Vernardos stopped the interview and turned up the volume on the three TV monitors over his desk – ABC, NBC and CBS.

Then the lights came up in the studio, Rather was rushed in and in a few moments the broadcast was ‘interrupted’ with a breaking news flash.

Vernardos sat at his desk and watched the news flash on the monitors. The other networks were doing the same.

Then, he turned to me, stopwatch in hand.

“3 seconds”, he said.

“What?”

A look of annoyance crossed his face. I was clearly an idiot…

“3 seconds. We beat them by 3 seconds”. He was very excited.

As if the viewers at home were madly switching between channels to see who was ahead by 3 seconds.  It was weird.  But this was the standard by which the networks measured themselves. They, and they alone, were the only ones who could possibly have noticed.

That fixation on ‘speed’ came about as a direct result of the impact of the telegraph on newspapers nearly 150 years earlier. So long ago that no one in the CBS Newsroom could even know why they were in such a mad rush, only that it was core.

As the web impacts and changes the news business, these two lessons are good to remember:

First, that an inability to see beyond the ‘initial purpose’ of a business can have devastating results.  Telegraph companies would later pass on the telephone, as not their core business either.  Broadcasters could own social networks it they could see that this is where they should intersect with the web – not become online webcasters.

Second, we tend to cling to old dogmas, long after they cease to make any sense.  The television news business, having spent 50 years fixating on ‘reporter personalities’ and ‘anchors’ still clings to the notion that there is a magic formula to putting the right reporter in Iraq, for example, for a ‘special’ report – oblivious to the fact that there are now about 2 million broadcast quality video cameras in Iraq every day. Some of them in the hands of US military, more in the hands of native Iraqis – both pro and anti American.

Ever seen any of that footage?

Go look on Youtube.

It beats The CBS Evening News every minute of the day.

And by a lot more than 3 seconds.