Taste for talent proved decisive in radio dominance over raw business skill

Evidence

Paley, meanwhile, loved to flatter and mingle with stars of both Hollywood and CBS. A natural programmer, he had a knack for guessing which entertainers had the ineffable charm to hook an audience, not just once but to make them tune in compulsively. “There were other men who were good businessmen,” writes Halberstam, “and others who were deft salesmen, but the feel for talent, that was something else, and it was essential in so public and volatile a profession as broadcasting.” Paley’s ear was good enough to notice talent from the briefest exposure, so he was always ahead of everyone else. “He could, in 1931, go on a shipboard cruise and by chance hear the records of a then unknown singer and know instantly that the singer was big, very big, and send back a cable telling his subordinates to sign Bing Crosby immediately.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 349

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of attention-merchant skills — programming talent as the earliest form of algorithmic audience-prediction, before any computation existed.
• CANDY: The image of Paley on a 1931 cruise hearing Bing Crosby’s records and cabling home to sign him is a delightfully concrete bit of trivia.