In the last issue of PR Vibes®, we highlighted part one of our interview with telecom industry legend, Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief of Light Reading. Click here to find out more about his start in the industry, the birth of Light Reading and how the telecom industry started to undergo dynamic changes.
In part two of our interview, Phil expands more on the growth of Light Reading and the impact the publication had on the industry.
Calysto: So, to continue, Phil, it sounds like from what some of what you are highlighting that The Street was a reason behind some of the early Light Reading success?
Phil Harvey: Yes, the investment side of the world was trying to get a quick fix on where the growth was going to come from within those companies. The dot-com bust happens, and a lot of that venture money was about to dry up. The weird thing was that there were several different kinds of investors that were interested in optical networking and telecom equipment at that time, because the way they saw it, infrastructure wouldn’t be subject to consumer whims.
The Street became very interested in what we were covering, because we were one of the only specialty publications that was super accessible on the Internet. We were ungated, so it wasn’t like reading The Wall Street Journal. We were writing in a style that I would say was a lot more alt-weekly than The New York Times. It was more than just the facts, and if somebody was repeating something stupid, we would call them out. The industry wasn’t a sacred place to us. We didn’t see ourselves as working for it, but more as writers who were interested and knowledgeable bystanders. And we made fun of people and companies and covered all the exploding bankruptcies from the startups that got all the funding. Then the funding dried up, they started eating each other and competing for the attention of the handful of giant carriers that were going to buy at scale.
It was kind of a bloodbath, and we basically just covered all of it without any skin in the game…. dispassionately writing about what was on fire and what wasn’t. You definitely annoy some folks with that approach, but you do gain the trust of the audience. They knew we were straight shooters and thus, we were not going to be overly nice to this company or that company.
Calysto: Tell me what really stands out to you from your coverage at what I will call Light Reading 1.0, where you took on some really big companies.
Phil Harvey: Light Reading today is definitely different…I would say more “magazine writer” oriented than “beat reporting.” A lot of what happened back then would be assigned as beats, and with clusters of companies or topics that an individual reporter would cover. And this is just how beat coverage works in general and kind of why I don’t really favor it now. If there wasn’t really anything going on, you still had to produce copy…so in essence just “find” a story. Sometimes that meant we were stretching the bounds of what was actually newsworthy or terribly interesting to our audience.
I think you’ll still find that when you see beat coverage today in the traditional B2B sense. You’ll still see people on slow news days really pulling out their fingernails trying to figure out how to get a story, how to crowbar something into an interesting story. I don’t practice that at Light Reading today.
Calysto: Telecom is turbulent and provides so much content. But, obviously finding the stories that will interest and educate the audience the most is important.
Phil Harvey: I think pound-for-pound we have the best writers covering the space. They guide themselves in tracking down the newsworthy stories. Some examples are what’s moving policy or moving money from one side to another with the telcos, and what they may look like in five years. How are they going to maintain what they’ve been defending for so long and that sort of thing?
I guess it was mostly a result of covering the dot-com implosion; which, if you accepted it at face value, was that five hundred companies were suddenly all going to “take over the world.” All of them were going to have unlimited internet traffic, and millions of consumers knocking down their door. We knew that wasn’t going to happen.
It seems like every few years we go through a massive consolidation and then an explosion of forming new companies or specialists and that sort of thing. It’s just sort of a cyclical thing in the telecom space.
Calysto: The Nortel series stands out to me as fantastic journalism from Light Reading V.1. I think you could package that up and make a book out of it.
Phil Harvey: Scott Raynovich, was on the finance side covering this and he knew when companies sounded too good to be true. Mary Jander, who was a great reporter for us back in the day, and still works with Scott over at his outfit Futuriom, took apart Nortel from the inside out. Maggie Reardon did some excellent reporting on the executive level – who was moving where and why? I chased bits and bytes, so I was covering the speeds and feeds and looking at the company’s optical acquisitions and how they were kind of a mess…that sort of thing. There was so much to dig into with Nortel because it was growing so fast and buying so many companies. But the thing I don’t want people to forget is that this was also theater for us – we were investigating and writing articles and suffered no shortage of information to highlight.
Nortel was NOT alone. Similar stuff happened at other places like Enron and Lucent Technologies. It was all these symptoms of the same disease, which is this kind of hypercapitalist mentality.
The sad thing was there was good stuff happening. There were boxes being built, bandwidth being delivered, and you had very competent R&D departments. The scientists were doing what they should be doing. Our goal was not to demonize everybody that worked at any of these companies, as they innovated constantly, coming up with a lot of interesting ideas and technologies that we still use today.
Calysto: It was a shame that in some respects the bad seemed to overshadow the good, by a fair margin.
Phil Harvey: The problem is that with many of these companies, that the main motivation was to raise the stock price. They all thought they were boom stocks and the next dot-com wonder, or Amazon or whatever.
Nortel, as an example, just wasn’t satisfied with having what was always considered a normal, profitable business…maybe growing like 3 to 5% a year. They decided that they needed to grow by 50% a year and that was the only way to outlast competitors. And then once they got the trumped-up stock prices, then they made a bunch of ill-advised acquisitions.
The flipside is we were also fascinated by the technology so it’s a little bit of both with us, and I think that’s why we get misread so many times. Some people think we were out to get their company or out to get the sector or whatever. And it’s like, no, it’s just interesting. This is the backbone of how the world communicates. We may as well try to do a good job of telling you why it works or why it doesn’t and who’s driving it.
Calysto: One of the cool things about Light Reading is that you’ve covered so many companies that have been acquired, spun back out, been acquired again, and low and behold that is true for you today, also. Was it high fives in the office after the first acquisition? Is that really what you guys wanted to do – sell to a big publishing company?
Phil Harvey: That would have been CMP Media back in the mid-2000s. The rank and file were kind of neutral to it. The people that had the stock options in the company at the top of Light Reading were very interested in it. Like any startup, they got paid a significant amount of money. The rest of us got, you know, generous bonuses. You could say, we had a nice year. For me it was just another day at work. Then, it was a different kind of work at a different kind of company.
Calysto: At some point after the CMP acquisition, which I will call Light Reading 2.0 – you left and went to the vendor side, but then Light Reading spun back out to 3.0 and eventually acquired you back. Are you the last of the original employees?
Phil Harvey: I was gone between 2013 and 2018. I think I’m the longest tenured Light Reading employee at this point. Now, there might be a couple of people on our technology team that are at Informa now, and don’t work on Light Reading day-to-day. I’ve been at the publication for 18 years now and believe I’m the longest standing Editor-in-Chief, however, there might be somebody that’s been at the publication longer than 18 years.
Calysto: Phil, thank you so much for all these insights. This was a fascinating discussion. Appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. Wish you all the best.
Phil Harvey: Thank you!
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About Light Reading:
Light Reading’s broad readership and solid reputation has made them a leading resource for telecom, mobile and cable network operators, cloud services players and all the companies that develop and supply them with technology, applications and professional services. The Light Reading Group incorporates a dedicated research division Heavy Reading, more than 15 successful annual industry events, several targeted online communities that dig even deeper into key areas of the global communications industry and its sister industry news site Telecoms.com.