PUBLISHING AND WESTERN UNION | 2006-05-06
The last Western Untion telegram was sent about a year ago.
I watched it die.
The last time I tried to use a telegram was a generation ago. I needed to reach someone and I kept calling. Then I had the ingeniuos idea that I would pay Western Untion to do the calling for me. So I sent them an intracity telegram.
When I finally did reach him hours later, he had not received the telegram.
You see, Western Union still had the same order of priorities it had had a century before, os under the orders of that precedence, whatever they were, it was hours before my telegram came up.
If the telegram had refelcted my priorities they would have had a whole new market: You pay for the telegram, they do the calling. But Western Union never budged from its century-old priorities. So it died.
Today's publishing industry is exactly the same.
The history of publishing today is also following the same rut worn by Western Union.
Western Union was terrified when the telephone was invented. It fought desperately to take away Alexaner Graham Bell's patent. Many of Western Union's owners and workers believed that, the minute people could use voice, the telegram would disappear. But the telegram lived for another century and a half, so anyone at Western Union (WU) who said they needed to change to deal with the new technology was laughed at as one of hte early panickers.
Another group of panickers who were wrong were in radio. They thought that television would make radio obsolete. Western Union's stand-patters could point out that radio is still very strong and very commercial.
What WU did NOT recognize was that radio survived by CHANGING. Ther is no comparison today between 1940s radio and modern programming.
Publishing is following the WU route.
Instead of using the new technology to bring out books faster, the delays in publishing are even longer than they used to be.
More important to us, instead of reacting to the heartland appeal of the internet and other new media, publishing is becoming MORE a cottage industry inthe middle of New York City.
As with radio and WU, the new technology that was supposed to destroy it has beena boon to the publishing industry. With the rise of television, more people turned to entertainment in their homes, like radio. With the rise of radio, more people turned to electronic communication, including telegrams.
More people read because of the internet. So, for the time being, publishing can be as stodgy as it wants to be and still survive.
For the time being.
The lesson radio drew from this wa that it could survive by erxp0loiting new markets. The lesson that WU and publishing got from this was that they could stay as they are, even moreso.
In my lifetime, you could still sent an article to a publisher or a book to a publisher and get it looked at. Now they tell all potential authors that they only accept manuscripts from professional agents.
Only established, ie, New York City approve authors need apply.
It was always a lot easier to get published if you lived and socialized in New York City. But since communications got out of that city, publication has become more provincial.
I remember when every television network was based in New York City. The setting of almost every television program, including The Twilight Zone, was in NYC.
Only one industry is still absolutely inbred in NYC and that is publishing.