Passage:

A historian of technology notes that early accounts of the telegraph often treat speed as the sole revolution: messages that once traveled for days could suddenly travel in minutes. The historian argues, however, that the more subtle change was administrative. Because information arrived faster, rail companies and news agencies could centralize decisions that had previously been delegated to local agents. This centralization did not always improve outcomes: when a distant office misread conditions on the ground, the resulting instructions could be rigid and poorly timed. Yet the historian emphasizes that the key novelty was not simply faster communication but the new expectation that a distant center had the authority to intervene quickly and repeatedly in local operations.

According to the passage, what does the historian identify as the more subtle change brought by the telegraph?