I’ve written a piece about Rupert Murdoch’s stand-off with Google for the Weekend FT, saying he ought to stop talking about it and go ahead and charge for access to newspapers such as The Times online. You can read it and comment on it here.

One does not need statistics to know that a lot of media companies - music labels, film studios, newspapers etc - are facing a crisis of profitability. However, the figures do bear it out.

Some new research from Deloitte has found that, while many industries suffer from intense pricing pressures and falling return on assets, the media industry is doing worst of all. In fact, the industry now has a negative return on assets of 4.4 per cent, compared with a positive 7 per cent 40 years ago.

I wrote about the Deloitte Shift Index in a column in June but it has now been updated to break out results for individual industries. The results are gloomy from the point of view of corporate profitability, although the consumer is getting a good deal.

Interestingly, although one might think instinctively that profitability is transferring from media companies to technology companies - sparking, among other things, Rupert Murdoch’s protests at Google - the latter are themselves struggling to adapt.

John Hagel of Deloitte argues that falling return on assets results from intensifying competition, both from  deregulation and the rise of digital technology. That means that increases in labour productivity are hard to retain as profits, instead being passed on to consumers in price cuts.

That looks very like the theoretical world of freely competitive capitalism, in which prices tend to fall to the marginal cost of production. Chris Anderson wrote about this effect in his book Free.

“All other things being equal, margins tend to get competed away. In the past, all other things have not been equal but they look pretty equal right now,” says Mr Hagel.

I’ve just returned from the launch of the new Barnes & Noble e-book reader, the Nook, which was bizarrely held in one of the most out-of-the-way spots in Manhattan - Chelsea Piers on the Hudson - at 4pm.

Perhaps the slog to get there and back, and sit in a hot, crowded room with lots of publishers and agents, has biased me against the product, which is a slickly executed attempt to rival Amazon’s Kindle.

It is about the same size as the Kindle, will be about $20 cheaper when it goes on sale at the end of November. It also gets one-up on the Kindle in various ways, including having a small colour screen at the bottom of the device (below the main E-Ink one) on which you navigate, and browse B&N’s electronic bookstore.

One thing I liked was that the books are sold in the Epub open format, which is supported by publishers, and the device runs on Google’s Android open source software. In contrast, Amazon sells books in a proprietary format, ensuring they can only be read on Kindles or Kindle software.

Apart from that, B&N has a decent chance of rivalling Amazon, at least in the US, because it has very strong distribution power through its 700 retail stores and 600 college book stores.

However, the somewhat chaotic event and the branding reminded me of the launch of Microsoft’s Zune music player, a late attempt to catch up with Apple’s iPhone.

The Zune also featured some extra gimmicks, such as the ability to swap songs between Zunes (the Nook allows one to “lend” books to friends to read on their own devices, or PCs).

In theory, the Zune was a smart attempt to mimic and improve on the iPod but in practice it gained very little traction. I wonder whether B&N will be able to overcome Amazon’s first mover advantage.

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.