Making comparisons between the output of old media journalists (such as me) and bloggers (such as me, I suppose) is a risky business. Anyone who does so, from either side, is prone to get his head bitten off by people from the other.

But my eye has been caught by the coincidence of views on the topic between Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times and Nick Denton, proprietor of the blog outfit Gawker Media and my former Financial Times colleague and book co-author.

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To the Media and Money conference (sponsored by our rival Dow Jones & Co but they invited me anyway) in Manhattan to hear Michael Eisner, the former chief executive of Walt Disney, expound on various topics including the "stupidity" of the Hollywood writers’ strike.

"They are misguided - they should not have gone out on strike. This is a stupid strike," he declared, arguing that the revenues from online streaming and downloading of film and television shows are not yet large enough to bother about.

I thought he made a decent point about the fix that studios are now in. They have proudly announced lots of online initiatives in order to convince investors that they are adapting to the new world, and have been caught by writers wanting a piece of the action. But actually, there is not much action in financial terms, compared with revenues from traditional forms of distribution.

Apart from that, he was most interesting on the topic of branding and what he had learned from Warren Buffett on the subject. Mr Buffett, he said, had compared a great brand such as Coca-Cola or Disney to a pointillist painting. You had to focus on making every dot (or product) beautiful and then the painting (or brand) would be beautiful too.

Our old friend, the person familiar with the situation, has been hard at work in the past few days. He (or she, since we do not know his or her identity) has popped up all over the place.

In The Wall Street Journal today, for example, "informed individuals" have been chattering about the severance package that Stan O’Neal can expect when he steps down as chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch. Meanwhile, "people familiar with the firm" told the Journal on Monday that Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, was a prime contender to succeed Mr O’Neal.

But the person familiar with the situation is an equal opportunity blabber. He (or she) also turned up in the Financial Times on Monday. People "familiar with the matter" predicted that Blackstone Group could walk away from a deal to buy part of PHH, a unit of General Electric. Simultaneously, people "close to the situation" suggested that the Ford family had cooled on the idea of selling the family firm.

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Column on the Financial Times comment page, October 18th

For me, the highlight of the launch of the Fox Business channel on Monday was when the sound went off as Ivanka Trump displayed the jewellery collection she is selling at her new Madison Avenue store.

The Donald’s daughter was a guest on the first outing for Happy Hour, an evening show on the US cable channel filmed in the Bull and Bear bar at the Waldorf Astoria. The hosts were Cody Willard, a long-haired hedge fund manager (and FT contributor) and Rebecca Gomez, a pneumatic brunette in a short, turquoise dress.

The rest of this column can be read here. Post comments below.

Critics of Rupert Murdoch often talk as if News Corporation exerts a monolithic right-wing grip on all of its media properties. Of course, there is something to it: Mr Murdoch is indeed a right-wing libertarian and is not afraid to express his views to his newspaper editors.

But the older that Mr Murdoch gets the more ambiguity emerges within News Corp. Peter Chernin, News Corp’s president, is a Democrat and Mr Murdoch has enthusiastically adopted his son James’ concerns about global warming. He has committed News Corp to reducing its carbon footprint.

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Even if Rupert Murdoch does not change a thing about the Wall Street Journal, there will be plenty of people convinced that he has done so, mostly for the worse.

However, it does not take a conspiracy theorist to be struck by the last paragraph of a column by Dennis Berman in the WSJ this morning. The article is mostly an interesting discussion of the parallels between Facebook and GeoCities, the community networking site bought by Yahoo for $4.7bn in 1999.

Then there is the final paragraph.

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