An Entrepreneur at Heart
by K.C. Neel -- Multichannel News, 10/12/2008 8:00:00 PM
The first thing Ray Joslin did when he was hired by Hearst Corp. in 1981 to launch a cable-network division was introduce himself to his fellow executives and get a feel for the company.
The first person he met was the general counsel, who told him he and his wife never watched TV and didn't see the need for it. The second office he walked into belonged to the head of the company's TV-station group, who told Joslin he was the enemy and that cable was out to ruin broadcast. The last executive he talked to that day was the editor of Harper's Bazaar, who told him TV cameras would change the way magazines did business and it wouldn't be for the better.
“I started thinking that maybe I made a mistake,” Joslin said. “It took about six weeks, but I came to the conclusion that Hearst wasn't going to go into the cable-network business on its own.”
Joslin knew ABC was in the process of putting together its own cable-network division and he convinced Hearst's CEO to create a partnership with ABC that teamed him with Herb Granath. The two men worked together for a quarter of a century and remain close to this day. The partnership has also stayed intact — Hearst and ABC's current parent, The Walt Disney Co., now jointly own some of the industry's most successful cable networks including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNNews, ESPN Classic, Lifetime Television, Lifetime Movie Network, Lifetime Real Women and A&E Television Networks, including A&E Network, History, The Biography Channel and History International. He also teamed with Capital Cities/ABC and NBC in 1992 to create New England Cable News, a regional news channel available to 3.7 million homes in the six-state region.
“I called Herb one day and said, 'Herb, we need to have a name for this entity. I'll tell you what, I flip a coin and if it's heads, we'll call it ABC/Hearst; and if it's tails, we'll call it Hearst/ABC,'” Joslin recalled. “Our offices were about four or five blocks from each other. I flipped the coin, it was tails and that was that.
“It was a testament to the strength of the relationship between the companies and between Herb and I,” Joslin added. “We didn't always agree, but we always worked well together. He is one my closest friends in the world and he was clearly the best business friend and partner I ever had.”
Granath — chairman emeritus of ESPN, co-chairman of Crown Media Holdings, and vice chairman of Central European Media — said the Hearst/ABC partnership “renewed my faith that with good will on both sides, a partnership can work and work well,” he said. They could also be fun. He, too, counts Joslin as one of his closest friends and allies.
One of Joslin's strongest attributes, Granath said, was his attention to detail. “He was a dog with a bone until he was sure all the T's were crossed and the I's dotted. He just didn't give up until things worked the way he wanted them to.” It took months for Joslin to convince Nick Davatzes to become A&E president but he finally gave in after months of pestering, he said.
“Ray had been after me for months to come to A&E and for one reason or another, I kept saying no. Finally — and I am still not sure how he did this — he convinced me to meet him the day after Thanksgiving at Oscar's Deli in Westport, Conn.,” Davatzes, AETN's CEO emeritus, recalled. “He was relentless. He said, 'Here's the deal' and he wrote it down on the back of a napkin. The rest is history. He was and is my friend and my mentor. We worked well together but Ray let me run my own shop. He always told me, 'Make sure you do the right thing. And treat this money like it was your own.' But he was also always willing to take a risk if it made sense.”
In his worst-case scenario, A&E and Lifetime were supposed to break even in five years, Joslin said. That happened in year seven. The fact that the Hearst board continued to back Joslin and his fledgling networks is proof of how much faith and confidence they had in his ultimate success, Granath said. “Ray was one of the smartest guys I have ever met but he never flaunted his knowledge of the industry. He was valuable to ABC as a partner because he has good personal relationships with the cable hierarchy. Clearly, the Hearst board had a lot of confidence in Ray's abilities.”
“We made a good team because our views and moral compass were similar. That kind of chemistry made it easy when we hit bumps in the road. We had to grow the old-fashioned way because we had no vertical integration. We worked hard at getting distribution and our experiences as cable operators were crucial,” said Davatzes, who started his cable career with Warner Amex Cable.
Joslin was one of the founding partners in Continental Cablevision. He was selling steel products in Findlay, Ohio, and his next door neighbor, Irv Grousbeck, tweaked his interest in cable TV. Grousbeck and Amos Hostetter were intent on securing cable franchises and building cable systems in Ohio. It wasn't long before Joslin ditched his sales job and joined Grousbeck and Hostetter to form Continental Cablevision.
He and his team would work all day in the cable office in Findlay. Then each night, they would pile into two station wagons to attend city council meetings around the state. Those long days and nights proved fruitful, though: Continental quickly secured 40 franchises in a row. Joslin served as the chairman of the Ohio Cable Television Association in 1969.
Eventually, he moved to California and started franchising for Continental there. He served as the California Cable Television Association chairman in 1981-82 and is a founding member of the Walter Kaitz Foundation. As CCTA president, Joslin led successful efforts to deregulate cable television in that state, ultimately setting the standard for national deregulation of the industry in 1985. He left Continental in 1978 and built three systems before selling them a few years later. He kept his equity in Continental until the company's assets and stock were ultimately sold to Comcast in 1999.
“I was always an entrepreneur,” Joslin said. “Continental was clearly entrepreneurial and I think I was a corporate entrepreneur at Hearst. I retired from Hearst because the industry had changed and was less entrepreneurial. It seemed to be less challenging somehow.”
Joslin retired from Hearst as president of Hearst Entertainment & Syndication and member of the board of directors of Hearst Corp. on May 31, 2004. On June 1, 2004, he became the CEO of a medical-equipment supply company he formed. Joslin teamed with a Tel Aviv-based firm that had a patent for an MRI machine software designed to detect cancer earlier than traditional tests. He saw an opportunity to change people's lives, not dissimilarly to the way cable changed the television business and the way people watched TV. But his company was up against giants like General Electric, Siemens Corp. and others and he ended up selling it last July. He has no regrets.
“Every family is affected by cancer in some form or another. I figured that if I had something that could help them in any way, I wanted to be part of it,” Joslin said. “I always tell people they really need to find something they really want to do. My career has been very rewarding. We created a better form of TV than existed before. I think my greatest achievement was being part of an industry that didn't exist and today is huge and meaningful and it changed the world. We didn't make every decision right, but we worked hard and we believed in what we were doing.”
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