Jeff Jarvis has replied to my review of his book What Would Google Do? on his blog.

His conclusion is that old media commentators such as myself tend to be out of touch, or perhaps biased as a result of where they work, and should be replaced by younger, fresher voices.

In principle, I am a fan of the idea of book authors responding to reviewers online (indeed, Chris Anderson and I had an interesting online debate about his book Free and my review of it). So I have to commend Jeff for his lively response to my review.

I plan to respond in due course. In the meanwhile, I commend it with one proviso: do read my original review rather than take Jeff’s word for what I said.

Mr Wasserstein has died at the age of 61. Read more about him below:

From the FT:

News: Lazard chief Wasserstein dies at 61

Analysis: Wasserstein role will be hard to fill

Profile: Wasserstein: Wall Street’s wizard

Conquests: Bruce Wasserstein’s top deals

Elsewhere:

Obituary at New York Magazine, which Wasserstein owned

Coverage from NYT DealBook Blog

Vanity Fair profile, with links to Wasserstein’s coverage and profiles over the years

Coverage from BusinessWeek

My column this week is on the late founder of Bertelsmann:

When Reinhard Mohn, the man who turned Bertelsmann from a printer of Protestant bibles in a small town in Germany to a global media company that employs 106,000 people, died on Saturday at the age of 88, it did not cause much of a stir.

Had it been Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, or Ted Turner, the kind of flamboyant, ageing, American entrepreneur whom most people associate with the media industry, the story would still be all over magazines and television stations – even those they do not own.

As it was, Mr Mohn got some respectful obituaries, but not a lot of further attention outside Germany. Somehow, unjust as that was, it suited the modesty of a man who preferred to bicycle to Bertelsmann’s headquarters in Gütersloh rather than take a private jet from New York to Hollywood.

Yet Mr Mohn was, from the end of the war to the 1980s, one of the most inventive media entrepreneurs Germany and the rest of the world has seen. His death comes as others are struggling to adjust to their industry’s convulsions.

Mr Mohn’s life has, I think, encouraging and discouraging lessons for media companies as they confront the upheaval of recording, print and broadcasting industries caused by the internet.

You can read the rest of the article here and comment below.

The past few days have not been kind to Nikki Finke, the blogger who has established a reign of terror over Hollywood studios and executives.

First, she (along with everyone else) was beaten to the story that Comcast may take a 51 per cent stake in NBC Universal, by her arch-rival Sharon Waxman, who runs the website The Wrap. Ms Finke pilloried the  story at first but then had to concede that it was sort of true.

Now comes a long, amusing profile in The New Yorker by Tad Friend, which describes her as “a combination town crier and volcano god”, and contains the following from one of her favoured sources:

The source says that he and [David] Geffen and Ari Emanuel and Ron Meyer certainly can’t dictate Finke’s coverage but they can ‘position Nikki to some degree - eight to twelve per cent above the facts, a little window dressing of protection, of delay, of shading, or of burying something.’

The piece concludes with this observation from Finke about Hollywood executives:

“They talk to me because that’s how the game is played. They’d like to ignore me, but they can’t. The best way for them to think of it is: I get bitch-slapped today, and someone else’ll get bitch-slapped tomorrow.”

Today’s recipient is Mr Friend, whom Ms Finke excoriates on her Deadline Hollywood blog in mostly unrepeatable terms:

As I expected, it’s an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I’m relieved that The New Yorker didn’t lay a glove on me. I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick (editor of the New Yorker], whom I enjoyed bitch-slapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod fact-checking process.

I used to regard Charlie Gasparino of CNBC as the surliest US business reporter but Ms Finke makes him look positively gentle. Her modus operandi reflects, of course, the theatrically aggressive culture of Hollywood, where this kind of rhetoric is normal.

If there is a lesson, it is that (as Mr Friend notes) the internet has brought back to Hollywood reporting the sort of cut-throat competition last seen in the 1920s and 1930s, when there were more newspapers and gossip columnists such as Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper fought for hegemony.

The era when most US cities were dominated by a single newspaper ended such brutal confrontations and ushered in the carefully balanced, respectable culture of modern US news journalism. Now, the internet is bringing back, for better or worse, the yellow (and red in tooth and claw) press.

Postscript: Nikki Finke tells me that she decried Sharon Waxman’s story because she believed that it was inaccurate (she used a more colourful term on her blog).

The original story on The Wrap said Comcast was in talks to buy NBC and quoted “two individuals informed about the meeting” saying a deal had been “completed at a purchase price of $35bn”. After Comcast denied the latter, it emerged that Comcast was negotiating to take a 51 per cent stake in NBC.

The notion that the head of a creative enterprise needs to be creative himself, or herself, has always struck me as dubious, for reasons that I have written about before.

It is certainly dubious that someone needs to be kept at the head of a media organisation because people like them, or they get on well with the talent. That was the justification used by many A&R men in the music industry and is regularly wheeled out elsewhere in the media.

It has popped up again in regard to Dick Cook, who has just been ousted as head of the Walt Disney studio, reportedly because he did not share enough information with Bob Iger, head of the holding company, and was poor at cost control.

Mr Cook seems to have been a beloved figure in Hollywood and some film stars are miffed that he was forced out, as the FT reports:

The departure came as a surprise to Mr Cook’s friends and colleagues. Mr Depp, the star of the studio’s blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, told the Los Angeles Times he was “shocked and very sad” at Mr Cook’s departure. A fourth Pirates film is in the works, although Mr Depp said Mr Cook’s exit had affected his enthusiasm for the project.

But if you have been around for as long as Mr Cook and are a nice guy, which he seems to be, then you are bound to have a string of long relationships with writers, directors and film starts. That is insufficient reason for you to be untouchable.

I have written a piece for the Weekend FT on Charlie Gasparino of CNBC:

Charlie Gasparino, chronicler of Wall Street and champion television reporter of its downfall, is in his element. He is sitting at a prime window-side table at San Pietro, his favourite lunch-time ­restaurant in Manhattan, ruminating on the financial crisis, when a familiar face appears.

It is David Komansky, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who has been lunching with another veteran Wall Street executive. He and Gasparino exchange warm words, and before Komansky leaves, he traces a circle on his left palm with his right forefinger. “Call me,” he mouths.

“He’s such a nice guy, and I wrote so many nasty stories about him,” says Gasparino. “I did this story about how Stan O’Neal [Komansky’s successor] took him out. O’Neal went to the board and arranged for everyone to report to him instead. Dave went ballistic about my story. He was very pissed and he told a lot of people I was an ass.”

You can read the rest of the article here and comment below.

I have written a piece for the Weekend FT on Rupert Murdoch:

It is a long way from Sun Valley to the Street of Shame.

That was the implausible excuse used by Rupert Murdoch when, on Thursday, in an interview at a media conference he was attending in Idaho, he was asked by his own Fox Business cable channel about the burgeoning scandal involving phone tapping and invasion of privacy by the News of the World in London.

“I’m not talking about that issue at all today … I’m far too removed around here,” he replied. Stuart Varney, the Fox Business anchor, obediently caved in to his boss. “OK, no worries, Mr Chairman, that’s fine with me,” he grovelled.

Mr Varney might have recalled the evidence given to a House of Commons committee by Les Hinton, the former chairman of News International in London and now publisher of The Wall Street Journal, about journalists: “Their job, most of the time, is to find out information that other people do not want them to find out.”

Yet, figuratively, Mr Murdoch was correct. The role he occupies today, as owner of the Journal, the Times of London and scores of media businesses around the world, is indeed far removed from 40 years ago, when he won a battle with the late Robert Maxwell to acquire the News of the World, a notorious scandal sheet.

That took him, as a thrusting 37-year-old newspaper owner, out of Australia to the bigger stage of Fleet Street. It also made his reputation as a brash, ruthless publisher with a tabloid sensibility and rightwing views.

At 78, he may or may not have mellowed – the cold glint behind his sunglasses when faced with Mr Varney’s question suggested not – but his reputation certainly has.

You can read the rest here and comment below.

Fred Wilson corrects the reference in my review of Chris Anderson’s Free to him dubbing the business model that Chris advocates prefers as “freemium”. He attributes it to Jarid Lukin.

Fred, whose early stage investing group Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Twitter, goes on to make some interesting points about free and paid-for services on the internet:

“I don’t believe everything will be free on the Internet. There will be plenty of paid business models. For example, if you want to watch Major League Baseball games live over the Internet, you’ll pay for that. If you want to use services like the FT and the WSJ frequently (more than 10x per month), you’ll pay for that. If you want to watch HBO over the Internet, you’ll pay for that. If you want a Twitter desktop or mobile client, you might pay for that too . . .

. . . the Internet allows an entrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrepreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn’t mean that everything they offer will be free. That’s the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don’t start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.”

This raises a point that I think is sometimes ignored in the free/freemium debate, which is that a company’s interests differ according to its position. In particular, charging nothing may well make sense to a start-up or a venture capitalist but not to an established business.

For social media services such as Twitter and Facebook, which are platforms for people to create their own content, free is a logical price. Because the cost of distribution is so low, and the cost of content is zero (people are donating it), any attempt to charge is likely to be undercut by a rival.

For a venture capitalist investing in internet businesses that are trying to grow as rapidly as possible, free is also a good bet. If nine out of 10 of those businesses fail because they burn through their capital but one grows enough to make money from advertising or freemium services, that is a good result.

Contrariwise, if does not make much less much sense for an established business with high fixed costs to start giving away content at below marginal cost because that way lies bankruptcy.

Of course, this is one reason why the internet is so disruptive. It provides a huge boost to the process of creative destruction by giving small businesses a platform to undermine big ones.