Transcript: Writer Ken Auletta speaks with Kerri Miller

Journalist and author Ken Auletta spoke with MPR's Kerri Miller on March 3, 2011 as part of the Broadcast Journalist Series. Here's a transcript of their conversation.

Kerri Miller: [0:01] I thought I knew a lot about our guest, because I've read his books and his New Yorker articles for years. I've caught him on Fresh Air and Charlie Rose and of course I have checked out his blog.

But until I googled Ken Auletta, I had no idea that he was known as the James Bond of the media world. Well, and why not? Glamorous and resourceful, crafty and charming, he is the author of many books, including my favorite, having been in television -- "Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way."

His newest book is "Google: The End of the World As We Know It." We'll be talking about all of that and more tonight. Please welcome Ken Auletta. [applause]

The James Bond.

Ken Auletta: [0:57] Oh, you're going to embarrass me, aren't you?

Miller: [0:58] Of course. Where does that come from?

Auletta: [1:02] Business Week it was a Business Week review of some book I wrote and I've never lived it down actually.

Miller: [1:09] Why would you want to?

Auletta: [1:10] It's kind of embarrassing. A journalist wants to hide their identity and listen to other people and not be perceived as someone who a cable guy, who talks too much and bloviates and has opinions about everything.

Miller: [1:24] And that is not you.

Auletta: [1:25] No, I have opinions but I don't share them. I mean my job is to listen and ask questions.

Miller: [1:32] I think a lot of us have followed your professional career. But I went back and read the high school commencement address that you gave to your daughter's class a few years ago. It was so interesting because you were revealing some of your pretty old biographical information.

Auletta: [1:55] Definitely not James Bond.

Miller: [1:56] That's right. I guess it turns out that, had we known you in high school, we would have never imagined that you would have achieved the things you have and that you would be called by Business Week Magazine, the James Bond of the media world.

Auletta: [2:11] I was thrown out of high school. That was the story I told in this commencement address. I was thrown out for good reason. I copped a book of passes to go outside the building to hang out at the sweet shop, which you aren't supposed to do at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island.

[2:32] My brother was the first one of us to go to college and my parents were determined that I would go. I was determined just to play sports. So they set up an appointment. I got to see the principal and the principal said to me, "Kennet" -- he called me Kennet -- I'll never forget. I was one of these kids who roll up their sleeves like that.

[2:57] He said, "Kennet, what do you like about Abraham Lincoln High School?" I said, "Well, I like football and baseball." He said, "Let me ask you another question Kennet." He said, "How you suppose you are going to play baseball and football for Abraham Lincoln High School if you don't attend Abraham Lincoln High School?" [laughter]

Auletta: [3:13] Duh.

Miller: [3:14] Good question.

Auletta: [3:15] That's when he got me.

Miller: [3:17] He became a pretty valuable mentor too, didn't he?

Auletta: [3:19] He became a lifelong mentor. We had lunch regularly. Abraham Lass was his name. He wrote a number of books. He wrote the education column in the old Herald Tribune and then the New York Times.

Miller: [3:31] Is that right?

Auletta: [3:32] I spoke at his funeral about five years ago. A great man. Just a great man.

Miller: [3:39] Did he know what he meant to you?

Auletta: [3:40] Oh yeah. I dedicated one of my books to him, sure.

Miller: [3:43] He assigned you a list of books to read. I was interested in whether you remember any of the titles that were on the list.

Auletta: [3:50] Well, it was a lot of Charles Dickens actually. There was a Trollope The Prime Minister. There was a Dostoevsky. He basically wanted to get me out of my little self contained tunnel world to see the bigger world out there. It took a while. But he had a profound impact on me.

Miller: [4:17] When you say he wanted to get you out of your little world, what do you think he thought literature would do to do that?

Auletta: [4:25] Spark my imagination basically.

Miller: [4:26] Yeah.

Auletta: [4:29] I was a narrow kid, who just football and baseball and hanging out and I didn't read very much. I liked history, but that was the only subject -- that and art -- that I cared about. He just basically thought maybe I could do something. But I couldn't do it unless he sparked my imagination. He did. I mean I just -- suddenly I was transported to places I had never been and I never imagined. It was fabulous.

Miller: [5:02] Reading was not something that your parents, that you saw in your own home?

Auletta: [5:04] No, my parents were high school graduates. My brother was the first to go to college, as I said. The truth is, growing up in a place like Coney Island; I wanted my brother to be a big tough guy, who would defend me if I got into little fights or something. He was a studious guy. I didn't respect that. That was the culture I was growing up in.

[5:31] Essentially, the challenge for your parents, my parents, was to try and pull me away from that street culture to a more studious culture. They finally succeeded. But it couldn't have succeeded without Abe Lass.

Miller: [5:49] I was going to ask you, you must have thought what the different turns your life would have taken had he not taken the kind of interest in you, and saw some kind of spark that maybe some of the other teachers didn't.

Auletta: [6:01] Well, one of the points I tried to make in that graduation speech to this girls' school in New York was look for mentors. Look for people of whom you can ask questions and maybe can impart some of their wisdom. But in order to do that, you've got to be humble. You've got to assume you don't know the answers.

[6:26] Teenagers assume they know the answers. So was hard. Essentially, the life I live now is really a life of asking questions. If you think about it, I can make an argument and I do make the argument that to be a good journalist you need lots of qualities.

[6:47] You need to be able to write. You need to be able to think. You need to be able to do the who, what, when and where of a story the structural things.

[6:57] But the most important thing you need, I would argue, is humility. Because humility assumes that when you do an interview you don't know the answer and you're going to actually ask questions and actually listen to the answers. One of the things I hate about what's happened to journalism is watching cable news. All of these people really have a hard time people asking questions, because their job is to make pronouncements. It drives me crazy.

Miller: [7:28] You know, what you've said though about not assuming that you know the answer, is difficult if you've been a journalist for a while. It's the thing that you always have to discipline yourself with, because you've covered a beat for a long time. You think you know what there is to know about whatever area you're covering. Still, to go into that as open minded as you can be, to ask the right questions.

Auletta: [7:59] But you see, I think you have to try and be open minded. But if you get the point where you feel you know the answers, then you ought to seek a new beat.

Miller: [8:09] Yeah.

Auletta: [8:09] One of the things I love about the media communications beat I have for the New Yorker, it is constantly changing. So the last book on Google is a very different book than the television book you mentioned.

Miller: [8:28] Right.

Auletta: [8:28] Essentially, I was going in as a naive. I think of myself as a guy who travels to different planets. So gee, let me go to the planet Google now and find out how the natives who are these people and what do they think and what makes them peculiar and different and good at what they do? I may have had some ideas but I didn't know. So I was asking ignorant, innocent questions.

Miller: [8:53] It's interesting that you would say travel to different planets, not just into a new area with which you don't have a lot of experience. But you feel like you are really going to a faraway world, where the language is different, as it is in the digital world.

Auletta: [9:11] That is so exciting. I actually don't tell my editor I said this but I can't believe people pay me to do this.

Miller: [9:18] So how do you begin when you decide that you're going to write a book about Google and you're not beginning with a very informed foundation I guess?

Auletta: [9:31] First, if you start at the beginning, you don't say, I didn't say, "I'm ready to do a book on Google." Because a book is this was a two and half year commitment and you don't want to make a mistake. So you want to be sure you're in love before you commit to the marriage of a book.

[9:51] What I did was I did a piece on Google for the New Yorker. Out of that piece I said, "This is really an interesting story." When I started the piece, I started with the ignorance. I'm saying, "My God, who do I talk to?"

[10:09] I knew Eric Schmidt, the CEO. Of course I had written a book and covered the Microsoft trial and had interviewed him before. But I didn't know Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the cofounders and I didn't know what an engineer did, which was actually one of the revelatory things I encountered.

[10:30] You start off like Colombo. You're asking these really, what seem like dumb questions.

Miller: [10:32] Like?

Auletta: [10:33] And they really are. Like, "Tell me about what you do." It's the equivalent of, "Tell me about the rabbits Lenny." But you just start off. You take notes and I additionally record all the interviews. Then at the end of the day, when I was at Google, I would literally go and stay out in Palo Alto.

[10:56] You go to Google at eight o'clock in the morning and I would leave there, let's say six. I would often schedule a dinner interview somewhere. But at some point I would have a couple of hours to go over my notes and type, what I call an index -- the things I've learned.

[11:15] Then I also type into what I call 'who to see in questions.' So if I saw someone and they provoked a thought, I put a little question mark in my notebook and I would then write it as a question. I'm building more questions for people.

[11:33] If someone says to me, "Well, this funny thing happened with me and Sergey Brin," I then write in the question period, "Ask Sergey Brin about this funny thing that happened." So you build up that way. It's very laborious and really tedious. But it actually helps you master the subject more and ask less dumb questions.

Miller: [11:52] You are pretty well known though. It's a little hard for me to believe that, when Ken Auletta shows up at Google, people are not -- you know they want to be on their game. They know that you're coming with...

Auletta: [12:07] I think that's not accurate. I think there are some cases where you talk to a media person in New York and first, in many cases they know me. I've been doing this for a long time. But you go out to Google. First of all, a lot of these people don't read books and don't read the New Yorker.

Miller: [12:26] Who is 'these people'?

Auletta: [12:27] Well, Sergey Brin. You go to Sergey Brin's house. His shelves are bare.

Miller: [12:31] Is that right?

Auletta: [12:33] Yeah.

Miller: [12:34] No books? I can't believe it.

Auletta: [12:36] There may be. There may be one or two. They are less impressed than the New York media or other media people would be by media folks. You are really asking questions and they are not long-winded questions. They are short questions and you are prepared. I mean I literally come in with a typed list of questions, which I've prepared days before the people I'm seeing. Then I write hand in, [inaudible] and stick them on that question page. And I'm taking them through, and you don't start off by asking your hardest questions. You start off by asking biographical questions.

Miller: [13:22] You should explain why you don't start with asking the toughest question.

Auletta: [13:26] I figured I'm talking to reporters here.

Audience: [laughter] [13:27]

Auletta: [13:29] I don't have subpoena power, as a reporter. But what I have going for me is the vanity of the people I'm speaking with. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, though sometimes it might be taken that way, and in fact, maybe meant that way. But essentially, people like to talk about themselves. And they think they've got a story to tell. And there's a certain frustration that no one's heard my story. And so I go in, not like a dentist who's going to drill their teeth, you know, which they don't want to spend any time with, but basically ask those questions about their life.

[14:14] And I find that's among the most valuable things I do. A, because I really learn about their life, and it helps illuminate things about what they do and what they've done. But secondly, it opens them up to me. Because I'm not just seeing them one time. In many cases, I'm seeing them multiple times. So I become someone they are sharing things with. And that's real important.

Let me give you one example. When I covered the Microsoft trial in 1999 and 2000, the judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson. There was no jury. Microsoft was brought up on antitrust charges, and this judge was going to hear the case.

[14:57] And I went in and introduced myself. I was in the court every day, but I went in and introduced myself to this judge at the beginning of the trial, without my pad or a recorder. And I just introduced myself. And I found out that he was a New Yorker reader. Loved hearing that. And I said, Your Honor, I said, I'd like to, I'm going to sit there, I'm not going to ask anything, but, of course, I had the luxury of time, which most journalists don't have. You've got to file tonight, right?

[15:27] And I didn't, I had that luxury of not having to file. And maybe I can come back and see you later on in the trial. He said, it would be my pleasure. So I went to see him after the witnesses had appeared, but he, we still had to go into writing a decision and stuff like that. We spent four hours in his office, from two to six o'clock at night, with my recorder.

Miller: [15:55] Wow.

Auletta: [15:55] And I only asked him personal questions about his life. I wound up doing twelve hours of interviews with the judge on two other dates, in addition to this first date. And the hours I spent talking about the trial, the issues, what he saw, why he ruled as he did, you know, what his recommendation was and why, none of that was as valuable as that first four hours. Because what I learned in that first four hours, his biographical information, he worked for Richard Nixon in the re election of '68 as a young attorney.

[16:27] And he felt betrayed by Nixon. He felt that Nixon was a liar. And he hates liars. His parents work in government, he's conservative, but his parents were civil servants, and he felt that Nixon demeaned government, demeaned civil service. And demeaned humankind by lying. And when he watched Bill Gates give 20 hours of deposition, surly, Bill Gates is a brilliant guy, but couldn't stand the thought of answering questions and was dismissive. He saw Richard Nixon. That was the most illuminating interview I did with him.

Miller: [17:10] I want to come back to the tough questions, though, because you made a point of saying you don't start with the tough questions. But you do have to get to them. What happens? I mean, do you spend a little time thinking about how this may change the rapport of the interview, and what's going to happen after you start asking those tough questions?

Auletta: [17:41] You do. The toughest questions, you generally save for the end, after you've gotten all the after you've mined the well and gotten all the information, oil out. But then you ask those questions. And you'll ask tough questions all through. I mean, but the really tough questions. I mean had one, when I was doing an interview, without going into the details of what I asked, but with Harvey Weinstein. He was, you know, the big movie mogul.

[18:16] And we did the final interview, I'd spent a lot of time in his office, watched movies with him, got a sense of how he judged a movie. He's a brilliant movie guy. And he was an awful human being in so many ways to the people that worked for him, as brilliant as he was. And I asked him some really tough questions. I actually thought we were going to get into a fist fight.

Miller: [18:36] Really?

Auletta: [18:36] Yeah. And the old Brooklyn Coney Island boy in me was kind of looking forward to it, actually.

Miller: [18:41] And what a story.

Auletta: [18:42] Yeah, it was a great story. And essentially, you know, but that, so that was an example where, that was probably as extreme a reaction as I've ever had in asking the tough questions. But, you know, people are, you know, when I did Rupert Murdoch as a profile. We spent 20 hours of taped interviews together. I lived in his office for 10 days, we had dinner many nights. What happened, and he still hasn't spoken to me since '95.

Miller: [19:13] Is that right?

Auletta: [19:14] Yeah. And it was a piece called "The Pirate." And he, I respect him immensely as a businessman. I mean, I think he's bold, he does a lot of things you want businesses to do, take chances, think long term. But in terms of what he does in journalism, it's, you know, I think it's repugnant, and wrote that. And what happens, what happens, and I asked him lots of tough questions in that period. But what happens, and it's a fascinating thing, and it happens more often than you would think.

[19:47] When someone spends that kind of time, and I try to spend that time with people in doing New Yorker pieces or books, they come to see and you're not writing tomorrow. In fact, you may not be writing, in Murdoch's case, for five months. And a book, two and a half years. They come to think of you, not necessarily as their friend, because they know there's a danger in talking to you, and you've got the recorder on. But maybe a little bit like their psychologist. They're kind of sharing secrets with you in their life. And then when you write something, they feel betrayed.

Miller: [20:22] Right.

Auletta: [20:23] And it's very normal, and unavoidable.

Miller: [20:28] I've experienced that, too. And still feel kind of the pangs that the relationship went awry. I mean, are you as sanguine about it as, well, that's how it is, and I've got my job and they've got theirs?

Auletta: [20:46] I'm more that.

Miller: [20:47] Are you?

Auletta: [20:48] Yeah. You know, as a young man, your life takes, I said this in that graduation speech to the high school students. You can't, J. Alfred Prufrock, measuring your life with coffee spoons. You can't do that. Because I have a graduate degree in political science. And I thought I'd be in government or a diplomat or something like that, and here I am, I cover the media and journalism, so go figure. But I worked a number of years in my 20s in politics.

[21:19] I worked for Bobby Kennedy, you know, I was a campaign manager for a guy I ran for governor, with my help, he lost. And because he lost, I went back to journalism. But I've often thought that, and I actually wrote a piece about this in the Village Voice, which is one of the first jobs that I had in journalism. I compared politics and journalism, and politicians and journalism, and one of the things I said is that I think journalists have to be tougher than politicians.

[21:50] In politics, you have loyalties. You're my friend, you supported me, you know, I'm with you, whatever. You don't have those loyalties in journalism. Your job is to represent the reader, or the viewer, or the listener. And to do that, you have to be really tough. Otherwise you're going to write, you know, sweet things and Valentines to the people you're reporting on.

Miller: [22:16] That is also one of the things I wondered about. When you spend the amount of time that you do with very dynamic, charismatic, interesting, brilliant people, how do you resist the pull of the magnetic personality?

Auletta: [22:32] You feel it. And it's a good question, because the, I like a lot of these people. I never tell them, I never tell them, you're wonderful. I don't give them advice.

Miller: [22:43] Thank God.

Auletta: [22:44] I may laugh at their jokes, and maybe I'll laugh a little harder than, but essentially, I keep a distance. But you're still, you're going to dinner with these people, you're interviewing them, you're really trying to draw them out. And it's a very sympathetic kind of thing. And there's no penalty. You know, you're just asking questions and listening. You're not talking.

[23:04] So I'm sitting here in Murdoch's office for 10 days watching. And then you go, but what happens is, I find him an attractive man, in a lot of ways. He has a surprising degree of modesty. He's obviously very talented at what he does. He's not a good example, because I always had a clear eye about what he did, you know, what I didn't like, and stuff.

[23:29] But you take people, and Harvey Weinstein wouldn't be a good example. But, a lot of, Howell Raines, who was the editor of the New York Times, is a good example. Where you really find how a very attractive guy, you've spent a lot of time in the New York Times newsroom with him, interviewing him, interviewing his relatives, et cetera. But then you're going off. I write at home, because I like to be near my refrigerator.

Miller: [23:59] Is that really why?

Auletta: [24:01] No, I like, I'm a very, I'm a friendly guy. And I would, if I was at The New Yorker, I would be going to lunch with people. And I've done lunches. That's when I'm out reporting. I'm doing lunches and meals. And now I want to write. And I want to be able to write at night sometimes, or 5 o'clock in the morning. I get up at five. And you can't, in The New Yorker, I'm going to stay in The New Yorker, in the Conde Nast building at 9 o'clock at night, you can't do that. And I have all these cartons of materials.

[24:28] But I'm sitting down for a month, and a book, it's nine months or a year. I have extracted myself from that planet, and from those people. And as time goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that I'm writing for you, the audience, not for Rupert Murdoch. And that's where the ruthlessness comes in. You know you're going to hurt them. Murdoch, for instance. When I wrote this piece, it was like 20,000 words in The New Yorker. And you do the fact checking.

[25:05] And Murdoch said to me, he could tell from the fact checker. I don't do the fact checking, we have the fact checking department at The New Yorker. But they all come to me with any disputes or questions, and I have to adjudicate them. In some cases, you have to call up the person and say, "Mr. Murdoch." By the way, I never call them by their first name. That's another way you keep a distance, you call him "Mr. Murdoch." And, there's this dispute, did you, and at one point, he said to me, he said, "This is really going to be a tough piece, isn't it?"

Miller: [25:35] That just dawned on him.

Auletta: [25:36] He said, "Am I going to like this piece?" This is a very common question people ask. And I give the same answer all the time, and it's true. I said, "I don't know." I said, "I hope you'll think it's fair. I promise you, you won't like everything, and if you did, I haven't done my job. But I don't know what you're not going to like." I mean, I literally had something I thought was a favorable piece once, and the person said, "What do you mean, I have thinning hair?" You know? So go figure.

Miller: [26:07] I was going to ask you, did he, did Murdoch ask you that in the fact checking phase of this? Or did he ask you that midway through you hanging out with him?

Auletta: [26:19] He probably asked it twice. He probably asked at some point hanging out and some... most people do.

Miller: [26:29] Don't you worry that he'll put his guard up then? It's a great answer. I don't know, and obviously you won't love everything.

Auletta: [26:35] Well they generally don't ask the question until they have separation anxiety. You're not going to be here tomorrow, Ken, to witness what I'm doing? [laughter]

[26:46] And that's when it's asked. It's not asked at the very beginning. What I do at the very beginning in negotiating with someone to try and get them to open up and make themselves available and let me be a fly on the wall is I say to them, I say, "Look. If I'm in, and it's on the record, you can't change the ground rules and make [inaudible] is off the record.

[27:12] But if you tell me that something... put my pen down or something's off the record, or you can sit in this meeting, Ken, but you can't use any names without clearing it because it's a sensitive meeting, I'll honor that, and I do. But I'll say to them... and they say, "What are the ground rules?" And I say, "Look. I'm here. I'm trying to write a fair and balanced piece as 'Fox News' does."

Miller: [27:38] Do you say that?

Auletta: [27:38] I do. I don't use "fair and balanced" as an expression. It's demeaned now. But what I say is that if I do my job, there'll be some things you won't like in this piece. I say that. And actually I think it's an important thing I say it, because I think it wins their trust. They think you're not trying to blow smoke at them, and I need their trust to do that kind of a piece.

Miller: [28:08] But you do know from the beginning. I mean, again, you had no blinders on about what Murdoch was going to be like. You knew there were things...

Auletta: [28:18] Oh, I did. I had...

Miller: [28:19] You did?

Auletta: [28:20] Yeah, there were things I didn't know about him that... going in. And by the way, I started off knowing more about him than the blind slate because when he took over "New York Magazine" and "The Village Voice," I was one of the leaders who went on strike to protest his taking over.

Miller: [28:37] Really.

Auletta: [28:38] And in the meetings with him, I was the spokesman. So he knew me really well from that, and he had... when I went to "The New Yorker," after my "Three Blind Mice" book, which was '91, I joined "The New Yorker" in '92 to write about communications and media, and I would interview him on various stories over the years.

Miller: [29:00] Interesting.

Auletta: [29:01] And I knew he liked me, and he enjoyed talking to me, and I enjoyed talking to him. I mean he's really an interesting guy on business stuff, and I mean I... one of the pieces I loved doing was a piece I did like in '94 where I asked one... I set up 30 people in the communications business to interview them.

[29:24] Murdoch was one. Oliver Stone was another. Jack Welch of GE was another. And I wouldn't tell them what the question was, but said, "I'm going to ask you one question."

Miller: [29:35] Ah, that's great.

Auletta: [29:36] And Michael Eisner at Disney was one. And the question was, "What won't you do?"

Miller: [29:40] Mm... That's so good.

Auletta: [29:43] And then I had done some research on what each of them had done, and that was one of the more fascinating things I've every done as a journalist, because you realize that a lot of these people have never thought about limitations that way. What they do is... what they won't do is something that doesn't get an audience. I mean... and so if you get an audience, it's good. It's a fact for good.

[30:05] So Murdoch, who has very conservative views on some things and whose wife at the time, Anna, was a devout Catholic, who recoiled at the page three semi nude in the "The Sun," of England, his newspaper there. So suddenly you're asking him about "The Sun" and his wife, and it was just great fun to watch these people squirm.

Miller: [30:29] It's really interesting to hear the psychology that you've developed with the job. I am interested in whether there is anybody that you've interviewed that really defies you know the tricks of the trade that you bring to it, kind of defies the psychology, that you have a very difficult time knowing.

Auletta: [30:55] Yeah, you have... I mean I've found Larry Page difficult to crack. He's the Google cofounder. Larry Page has read books as a young man. He read a lot of business books, particularly, and science books. He was immune to charm.

Miller: [31:20] Even James Bond's charm.

Auletta: [31:21] He was immune to questions about, "Tell me about the rabbits, Lenny," or anything like that. He was just efficient, businesslike. And I tell the story... I took this out for a reason. I interviewed Barry Diller. This is another valuable thing as a journalist and for all you journalists in the room.

[31:45] I interviewed Barry Diller who's usually a very good raconteur and recalls vivid anecdotes. And I had a relatively unsatisfactory interview with him about Google who he competes with in some ways.

[32:03] And I went to a book party that Murdoch, Harvey Weinstein, and Barry Diller gave... not a book party, a party for 23andMe, Sergey Brin's wife's genetic testing company at the Barry Diller IAC building downtown.

[32:25] And I witnessed Barry Diller... I'm standing there talking to Barry Diller, and Sergey Brin in his jeans has this big camera, and he doesn't like crowds, and he's fairly shy as is Larry Page. And he says to his wife, "I'm going to leave." And she says, "You can't leave. This party's for me. You have to stay."

[32:46] And he says, "Oh." And so he agrees to stay, and Barry says, "Typical, unbelievable," whispers to me. So I call Barry. I email Barry Dillon the next day. I said, "We need another interview." And he said, "Well, I'm going to Italy in two days." I said in the next day.

[33:06] So he broke a lunch date. We had lunch. And he told me the following story which was worth this visit. And a reminder... David Harleston once told me this years ago. He said, "Go back for that second interview if you're not satisfied the first time because you may come up with a gem.

[33:23] And the gem that Barry Diller told me was this. He was the first traditional media person to visit the Google guys when they were above a bicycle store in Palo Alto in 2000. And he went and he's talking to Larry Page, and Sergey Brin rollerbladed in as he did. By the way, every interview I had with him he rollerbladed into the meeting.

[33:48] It was just a riot. Don't fall down. And Barry is talking, and Larry Page is doing this top of his head. And Barry Diller says to him, "Larry, I'm talking to you." "It's OK, Barry. I can do both." He said, "No, no, Larry. Choose." I choose this. [laughter]

Miller: [34:15] Is there a question that you always ask but always hesitate to ask in these profiles? Is there one that you kind of have to work up to but one that you have found elicits a very interesting answer?

Auletta: [34:42] You know, you've stumped me. I can't think of... the ones that are valuable as I've said before are those early tell me about your family growing up where, and you just dig into that, and about two hours later you're at age eight or nine. [laughter]

Miller: [35:05] Oh my gosh. Seriously?

Auletta: [35:05] No, but you're at age 18 or 19, and that's great. I'm not bored by that. I mean you're finding amazing stuff from that. I mean biography is life, and you know Sergey Brin at...fleeing the Soviet Union with his family because they were Jews, discriminated against.

[35:31] They were scientists, and they were not allowed to work in the most prestigious programs like atomic programs since they were Jews, and fleeing and how he feels about totalitarian governments from that.

[35:46] And when you say what happened... when I saw Google's decision on China, I didn't need to ask a question of anyone. I knew exactly what happened. That was Sergey Brin driving it. Then I asked questions and it was. But I knew it because I had had those interviews with him where he talked with some passion about his childhood.

[36:08] And you know Murdoch talking about his family, which he built a much bigger company than his father did, but... and how in Australia and how they feel estranged from... and outsiders. That's very much... why has Murdoch never been knighted? He's always rejected it because he's wants to stay an outsider at least in his own mind. He's not an outsider when it comes to politics.

Miller: [36:37] I assume that you've watched that Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford, right?

Auletta: [36:44] I read about it. In the paperback version of this, I start off with that speech in the epilogue, in the afterword.

Miller: [36:53] Has anyone here seen that? It's Steve Jobs giving a commencement speech at Stanford. It was so fascinating. I just watched it again about two months ago. He describes that experience of dropping out of Reed College and then just basically dropping in. Will you talk a little bit about...?

Auletta: [37:15] Steve Jobs, who never talks about himself -- if you watch and read all the interviews done over the years with him, he doesn't talk personal. It's all business and it's Apple. And he talked about life lessons that he learned. This was a 14 minutes speech. I call it the Gettysburg Address of graduation speeches. It's the greatest graduation speech I've ever read or seen. It's on YouTube, by the way.

[37:46] And he talks about what he learned at Reed College, and he said, "You know, life is... serendipity is real important, and one of the things you'll find, and I found out... I would monitor classes, and I monitored a class, a graphics class, and I saw in that class the cryptography and this beautiful cryptography that I just loved.

[38:16] And it stayed with me. And when we designed the Mac in the'80s that Reed College class I monitored came back and that's in there. And then he talked about staying hungry and how you have to constantly search and strive and do more, and he talked about experiences he had.

[38:42] And he said, "One of the greatest things that ever happened to me was being fired at Apple in the mid '80s because I suddenly felt defeated. I was humiliated. But I had to fight and claw my way back, and that was wonderful. And that was a spur for me."

[39:02] And he said, "The other thing I've learned in life is that death is the great equalizer." This will be repeated if and when he dies at some point. He said, "Because death clears out the old and brings in the new, and you need that." And it's just an extraordinary speech and you watch the students reacting to it.

[39:29] And, I mean, I've given graduation speeches, and I've seen graduation speeches. And it's very, they're very hard to do. And people want to celebrate and get on with their lives and hug their classmates, and not listen to you. Everyone was listening to Steve Jobs. It was great.

Miller: Is there a thread that you find with these media moguls and these founders of these companies that, maybe I should ask it like this. What do they tell you about that idea of staying hungry that Steve Jobs talked about in the commencement address? When they have everything, so what motivates them?

Auletta: [40:21] Well, money motivates. I mean, one of the things you find is that a lot of people, at that level, keep score by how much money they make and what their stock price is. So that's one thing. Some of it is just sheer competitiveness. And one way to keep score of who's ahead is what your stock price is, or what your profits are, your margins are. And some of it is vanity, which is that, I want to be number one. And so they stay hungry that way. Are they as hungry as Steve Jobs?

[40:58] One of the points I make in this book, Google book, is that one of the things that happened to traditional media, and one of the reasons why they're suffering in the digital revolution at the hands of companies like Google, is that the music industry, the newspaper industry, the book publishing industry, the advertising industry, telephone industry, Microsoft, software industry. They sat back and tried to protect their existing business at a time when their business was being disrupted fundamentally by the digital revolution. Google News. iTunes. Right?

[41:45] I mean, when you think about it, here the music companies are, and they say, well, we're not going to sell individual records. You have to buy the entire CD for 17, 18, 20 dollars, right? And then Steve Jobs comes along in 2001 with iTunes and says, 99 cents, you can buy an individual song. And you can download them, and by the way, before you download them, before you spend your, you commit that 99 cents, we'll let you listen to it for 27 or 28 seconds, to see if you're sure you really like it. Bingo. Where were the music companies? You know, suddenly they've got no business. What were they doing? They were suing their customers for downloading on Napster all the time. It's insane.

[42:28] And look at newspapers. Newspapers are saying, you know, well, we had, 15 years ago, we had online newspapers, right? They didn't do what this school day, of jettisoning the print edition and going right to an online edition. And they shouldn't have, because you make more money in subscriptions and advertising with a print paper than you would online.

[42:53] But if you go back and look at the newspapers online that they were doing, the editor of the online newspaper reported to who? Reported to the editor of the print paper. The editor of the online newspaper's not allowed to publish anything until it appeared the next morning in the paper. Which defeats the whole purpose of 24/7? Digital news is available any time it happens. And all of us know, we don't wait for the evening news to find out what happened at 6:30, right?

[43:16] All day long we're plugging in to what's happening. So media organizations have to comply with what we know is available to satisfy our desires. They didn't. They satisfied their existing business. It was a classic, what's called the innovator's dilemma.

[43:37] This guy, Clayton Christiansen, who's a professor at the Harvard Business School, wrote a great book, 15 or so years ago called "The Innovator's Dilemma," and he said, throughout history, businesses always do this. They protect their existing business and ignore or don't put enough resources into something that might challenge and actually take away their business.

[43:59] And so I came to the conclusion, to finish this long winded answer, that there are two types of people in this world. There are the people who lean back and basically say, "Oh, woe is me, Google is doing these terrible things to me. My business is threatened, I need help, I need protection." Whine, whine, whine. And then there are people who lean forward and say, "This digital wave, this digital revolution, this is not a problem. It's an opportunity. And I'm going to figure out how to ride that wave and re define my business in a different way."

[44:34] So music companies should have, much earlier, been doing, selling singles and doing it digitally. Why couldn't they get together? Why couldn't book publishers get together and do what Amazon has done? Well, there are anti trust questions, but I'm sure they could have been more clever about that. But they were afraid, they wanted to protect their existing hardcover business, and in fact, it's threatened now.

Miller: [44:57] So they stay hungry, in essence, by leaning forward. By challenging the status quo.

Auletta: [45:03] Correct.

Miller: [45:04] And disrupting, and taking a lot of opportunity in that.

Auletta: [45:07] If you think about it, whatever business you're in. Let's say you're a librarian. Or you're a travel or a real estate agent. Your business is menaced. I mean, I can go on to talk about newspapers and journalists, et cetera. Advertising. The digital revolution threatens teachers. Threatens all of us. Distance learning is a threat to this college. And Expedia is a threat to travel agents. You're not paying a fee to the travel agent when you go to Expedia.

[45:40] And librarians, Google is a threat to librarians. I'm Googling it, I don't need to go to the library. I have a library at my fingertips. And advertising agencies? What do I need you for? I mean, Google, or someone else will collect and do digital ads for me, and charge much less than your four or five percent that you charge me to do media buying. And why do I have to spend three million dollars on Super Bowl ad, when I don't know who's watching the ad, who bought my product because of the ad, when I can do digital advertising and find out who clicked on it, who bought my product, who likes it, who tuned out the ad, who didn't tune out the ad?

[46:19] So what every business has to think of, from the journalist to the librarian to the real estate agent and travel agent is, what can I add? What is the value I can add that the Google's of this world can't match? And if I'm a travel agent, I still use my travel agent when I'm flying economy, for instance. Why? Because the travel agent can get me, and it's worth 25 dollars to me, they can get me a bulkhead or an exit row seat, where I can write on, say, a cross country flight. And I'm not crowded and that. And I can't get that.

Miller: [46:57] Wait. You can pick your own seat, you know, online?

Auletta: [46:59] You can't pick a bulkhead or an exit row seat on Expedia.

Miller: [47:03] Hmm. It's worth a travel agent then. Should we open it up to some questions from the audience?

Auletta: [47:11] Whatever. Sure.

Miller: [47:13] OK. Good. Raise your hand, if you have a question. All right. Right over there.

Audience member: [47:28] Ken, you had recently said that the newspaper model is broken and I would certainly agree with you on that. What I'm wondering is, do you have worries that going forward in the digital age, that there isn't the revenue that's going to support mass media journalism, or do you think the substantive, in depth journalism is only going to be available to elites?

Auletta: [47:55] What do you mean by elites?

Audience member: [47:58] People who read The New Yorker, others who are well educated, people who have money, people who are paying for the Wall Street Journal online, people who are willing to pay online. And that others are basically going to get free media that doesn't give you much beyond the headlines.

Auletta: [48:14] I did a piece a month and a half or so ago on AOL. And I asked, AOL is hiring more journalists in this country today than any other institution. And they're doing it largely to create this Patch, which is these hyper local sites. There are over 900 of them now, each one run by a journalist who lives in that community. But they're hiring them for other things, now, obviously. They did this merger with, they acquired Huffington Post. If you ask AOL, if you ask Huffington Post, which I did, if you ask Yahoo, which I did, how many foreign correspondents do you have? You're right. Zero.

[48:59] The New York Times, I was in Afghanistan last spring doing a story for The New Yorker. And I wasn't in Iraq, but in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, the New York Times spends $7 million a year in both of those countries to report. And they do brilliant reporting. Reporting that is essential for us, as citizens, to understand what is going on in the world. The digital world doesn't do that. And so it's a worrisome thing, in the future, when you think about journalism. Who's going to do, who's going to spend that seven million dollars to report on these two battlegrounds where our young men and women are dying, and innocent civilians are dying?

[49:46] Who's going to do that investigative reporting? Who's going to send reporters to the state capitol or city hall, to do the kind of reporting you need in a democracy? That's the real question. There is no question, in my mind, that many newspapers will close, many radio stations will shutter, many TV stations will. That's inevitable. The question is, can they, and it's your question. Can they figure out a way to make money in the digital world? Well, Apple has figured out how to make money in the digital world. And a fair number of people who create apps for the iPad and the iPhone are making a nice living on those apps.

[50:28] And in fact, one of the hopeful things that's happening today, and I say this near the end of my book. I think journalists, for instance, have to try and create a pay wall. Have to try and charge for online. Can't just rely on advertising.

[50:46] Because the truth of the matter is that the amount of money that a newspaper gets for an ad online is about a tenth, one tenth, of the amount of money they get for the same ad in the print newspaper. And you don't get the same amount of money from subscriber online, even if you're charging, as you do from the subscriber print. So you have to figure out how to try and generate some income from that.

[51:13] Every newspaper will tell you that, every magazine will tell you that, every book will tell you that. Increasingly, one of the hopeful things that's happening, is that companies like Google and Apple will tell you that now. Because one of the things that the recession taught them was that advertising is a very slender reed to lean on. Advertising was the first thing that was cut back. So they say, "Oh, my God, we have to figure out another revenue stream." They're not going to figure out another revenue stream unless they have good content. To get good content, they've got to pay for it.

[51:46] And YouTube increasingly is paying for content now. And I would bet you that in the next two years, a major competitor for Netflix will be YouTube, not to mention Amazon. And if you look at iTunes and the app world, that's another model for where people, and that's why Murdoch, again, this is the good Murdoch. This is the Murdoch that really has a lot of guts. He started this newspaper as an app on the iPad. To see if it'll work, and he's hired a lot of people.

Miller: [52:20] Do you like it?

Auletta: [52:21] Yeah, I mean, I like it. It's too early to judge it. I give it a, I mean, we're too quick to make judgments. I mean, am I enamored of it? No. But I wouldn't write a column about it now. It's too early. Give them time. Most columnists don't get a voice and a rhythm until many months after writing a column.

[52:42] But I am hopeful actually that the two worlds which were so far apart, the digital world and the traditional media world, the analog world are coming much closer together. And it is an awful thing.

Audience member: [53:06] First of all I want to thank you for a really great presentation, enjoyed your insights.

Auletta: [53:11] Good questions.

Audience member: [53:13] James Bond couldn't have been any better. I also was really impressed because of my interest besides what you said was this relationship you had with your principal. I don't know how big your school was.

Auletta: [53:30] Three thousand.

Audience member: [53:31] Great story about how you bonded with him. But my question is, were you the only student that he did this with. Or was it just a characteristic of him that he bonded with and helped a lot of people.

Auletta: [53:48] He helped people and I don't think that was alone. I probably got closer to him than any others that he had mentored. But he mentored many other people. I think it was has in his genes.

Audience member: [54:09] So you wrote "Three Blind Mice." What's the metaphor or symbolism you might use for CNN and Fox and MSNBC.

Auletta: [54:19] Well, they are more than three of them. That's a good question. I try to not to watch them too much. First of all, even CNN which I think does a better job in many respects, they don't do a lot of reporting. And one of the things that cable does, which I don't like is they figured out where to do news on the cheap is that people on a studio, and expressing their opinions.

[54:56] And one of the things when you go and do, I don't do a tremendous amount. I turn down most things because I don't have time to go, sit and do what I am about to describe. When you go into a green room, you see these lawyers and these ex politicians sitting around, waiting to go on camera.

And they may be spending two hours a day doing that. It's totally insane. But they get such a, it's like a narcotic, to go and be on the air. And it is just weird. I have really nice producer Bloomberg TV who calls me up and said, 'Can you come in at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning? Or can you come in at 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon to talk about this?'

And I always say no. And I am up at 6, but I am in my gym shorts at 6. I don't want to go shave and get -- it spoils my whole day. I am writing. I don't have time to -- but the truth is she is shocked that I say no. People say yes. It's just stunning to me.

Miller: [56:06] Now you do do Charlie Rose.

Auletta: [56:08] Well Charlie, lets you finish a paragraph. So that's OK. And Charlie, you do Charlie at 5:00 or 5:30. And you may bump into Angelina Jolie. So it is worth it.

Miller: [56:23] It's nice, those interviews do breathe, don't they.

Auletta: [56:27] He is quite good, he is a friend of mine. And I just love what he does and it's so contrary to so much of what you see on television today. It's one of the reasons why public radio and public TV is special and some of it is going to be a dinosaur. And I think this is the reason people talk.

[56:54] And it's worth circling back to it. I think one of the key reasons people talk and this has, this is not about family. This is about wanting to communicate. If they feel you are genuinely interested in understanding what they do, and what the nature of their business is, they want to talk about it.

[57:17] And that's what Charlie Rose does. He basically conveys interest. I want you to tell me your story. I want to hear it. And he is curious. And it is palpable. And it comes right through the screen. And I think that's good interviewers have that ability to convey because it's genuine. And Charlie is genuine. He is really good at it.

Miller: [57:40] That curiosity that's just... and the business doesn't go away?

Auletta: [57:46] And they are not interrupting to announce their opinions. They want to hear yours. That's what their job is. Charlie Rose's job is to bring, let these people flower and bring it out. Now you have to ask him tough questions, and unpleasant questions. But nevertheless they've had an opportunity to explain themselves, which is what they want.

Audience member: [58:13] I wanted to ask, you said that when you were in the school and this principal directed you to these books to read and it opened up a universe and opened up your imagination. To what extent will the digital world do the same thing?

Auletta: [58:30] Actually I worry about that. I worry about multi tasking. I worry about what it does to our attention span, when we are sitting there. I have a 15 year old nephew and I talk to him about this and I worry about it. Because he is watching television, he is instant messaging, he is listening to music, and he is supposedly reading his homework, right.

[59:01] You can't do that, I think. And when you do, when you ask how they do a paper in school, a lot is Wikipedia. It's Google. And you can't, you miss out when you don't dig deep into a book and really try and comprehend. And you don't get it fast. Now you can plagiarize all these, but certainly private schools do and most universities do, where they can literally check.

[59:37] There are a couple of websites where you literally can check whether someone has plagiarized and borrowed phrases. So they are not cheating that way or getting away with it. But they are cheating mentally. And I worry about that.

[59:48] I asked him the other day who is supposed to be the Great Gatsby. And I said did you finish it? And he talked about Nick, he talked about some of the characters. And I said did you finish it. He basically did a cheat sheet on which the characters were and stuff like that.

Miller: [60:05] Obviously missing out.

Auletta: [60:06] And, well if he has to answer to his uncle, he had to read it.

Audience member: [60:15] Thank you for the interesting talk. I am curious given your insights with Google, how you react to the news about how they responded to companies like JCPenney that have, there was a piece reprinted in the local paper about the sort of draconian quick action but yet it's not transparent, and the thesis of the piece was they are controlling what we see, and information wise.

Auletta: [60:40] It's a conundrum. I think Google did the right thing. And there are organizations called, there is a conference that's held twice a year, search engine optimization conference. And thousands of marketers go to these.

[61:01] I went as I was reporting my book, couple of times. And what they do is they tell you hire us, and we can teach you how to trick the Google search or the Bing search, so that your company will appear on the first page, high up on the search results.

[61:20] So Google is criticized for not being transparent. They are absolutely right not to be transparent. They have to keep the search engine algorithm in a black box. Because they are trying to defeat people who are trying to trick the system. The most important thing Google has going forward, I would argue is trust. You trust that the answers you are getting are honest as the best they can.

[61:43] And they are not favoring an advertiser or favoring someone who has paid off. Now if Google starts to be questioned that maybe they don't deserve the trust. By the way the European Union is now challenging them saying that they are as Google buys more companies those companies appear in search results.

[62:05] If the Google companies appear higher, then others would just the claim that's made in the European Union. Then Google risks undermining their trust and therefore people won't come to their search engine. But I think they are struggling and properly so, to try and prevent people from cheating and gaming the system.

Audience member: [62:31] When you are interviewing somebody for a story and you come across negative information about your subject or person. How do you decide whether or not to include it, to what extent do you think how it contributes to the story versus how am I get ratings or something along those lines.

Auletta: [62:54] You don't have to. That's not a worry you have very much in place like the New Yorker. I have a piece in the current issue on a trip I made to Africa and [inaudible] the first cell phone network there and the opening scene was Bono and I interviewed Bono who went with this African billionaire, who I am profiling.

[63:15] And I had much more about Bono in that lead I wrote than actually appears in the magazine because the editors, they don't care about Bono, they are not looking if this was for most newspapers or most magazines that would have been, the Bono thing would have been played up much more than it was.

[63:35] And I didn't do it to sell magazines, I do because I thought he was really interesting. But there is almost an aversion on their part to have, it's a play up, it would still be like Bono. The test is, is it relevant, does it tell me something. Does it tell the readers something fundamentally important about this person I am writing about. Or this organization I am writing about.

[64:00] And if it is something, let's say it's someone who is having an affair, I would not write about that. And I have encountered that, by the way, and haven't written about it, unless somehow it affects, they are doing something illegal. For instance sexual harassment, very hard to prove but well I had pursued that in a number of cases.

[64:27] And if there is sexual harassment and there was a payoff, the settlement, ooh I have to see the check, which I have done too, by the way. You are going to write this, I said unless I see the check I am. And what you want to see is that the check was not a corporate check.

[64:44] Someone is paying someone to be silent. And if they do it their own, and the person is not going to testify you can't get them on the record. But you can get the check on the record. And so I've done that. And I've also had instances where someone was, told me a story about their family where their daughter was suicidal. And it affected this person. I didn't write that because I didn't think was relevant to, we didn't need to know that. I believe that was in the realm of privacy.

But if I were covering a politician and I found out that he was paying off his [inaudible] and write it, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to write about that.

Audience member: [65:46] My parents come from Wisconsin, and they see our New Yorkers on our table, and they think we're being duped. And they start talking to me about the radio they've been listening to, and I just sort of automatically start tuning them out. What can you tell me about how people deem news sources to be trustworthy, and how people can converse when they disagree about that?

Auletta: [66:08] One of the reasons why I really hate what's happened to cable news, is that, and it's happening in the magazine world as well. People increasingly are going, it's narrow casting. And so people are going to the news, what they feel is their point of view in news. So if I'm a conservative or a Republican, I'm going to FOX. If I'm a liberal or a Democrat, I'm going to MSNBC. And CNN is suffering because they're kind of in the middle. They don't have that ID, that identity.

[66:46] And when people talk about brand, which is a phrase that drives me nuts, I mean, because everyone is talking, using the phrase. You have to re brand, you have to extend the brand, you have to brand this, brand that. And the truth, in journalism, the only brand that matters is credibility. And the people who talk about brand don't understand that. But what they really mean by brand is, what is your ID? And do you have a built in audience? And that's what FOX is about, and that's what MSNBC is about. And I think that's really dangerous.

[67:24] And, you know, we had, at one point, in the early days of newspapers in this country. That's what they were. They were partisan vehicles. Before you had Metropolitan Daily, you had parties that put out papers in the 19th century. And then when cities came about, in order to appeal to this mass of people, you couldn't be narrow casting anymore. You had to become more general. And as technology has given us many more choices, in order to stand out, and we've lost the mass of television and radio.

[67:59] In order to stand out, you try and create an identity as conservative, talk back radio, you know, whatever. So you get the Rush Limbaughs and the Glenn Becks, and mostly conservatives on radio, certainly. But Keith Olberman is, you know, I have no more regard for him than I do for Beck or Limbaugh. Maybe a little more, but not a lot.

[68:36] And, but, you know, they, but one of the things that a lot of people like me who criticize them don't often recognize, which we should, they are really good entertainers. Glenn Beck is really good at what he does. He's a storyteller. Rush Limbaugh is a storyteller. Keith Olberman is a storyteller. And people think of Roger Ailes at greater FOX news as a kind of a Darth Vader character. He's a brilliant producer. Bill O'Reilly is a really good storyteller. Now I find it unbelievable, you know, what these guys do, but they're good at what they do in appealing to an audience.

Miller: [69:20] It's up to the audience to realize whether the story's true or not, right?

Auletta: [69:24] Yeah. So, I mean, yes. I mean, ultimately, I mean, I have people who say the New York Times is a liberal newspaper. It's a liberal, editorial, partisan newspaper. I think the New York Times, I think most journalists that I've met, and I'm curious whether you agree with this. Most journalists, I think, wake up and want to do the right thing. They cheat because they do these sensational stories, and all that. But they don't lie. They don't consciously say, "I'm going to spin my liberal point of view, or my conservative."

Miller: [69:55] Because your credibility is everything, right?

Auletta: [69:57] Right. But also it's a sense of public trust. That you're, I think most journalists want to do right. That's not to say that most do. But they don't, because, I mean, I think, journalism really is in a bad position and deserves its low ranking in the polls. Thankfully, we have politicians who outrank us.

[70:20] But most journalists that I know don't lie, steal, or cheat. But they're working for desperate institutions that are desperate to snare an audience, and they become more and more, they're corn hole barkers.

Audience member: [70:42] I have to throw you a softball question, Mr. Auletta. I'm wondering, since Coney Island, does baseball have some place in your life these days?

Auletta: [70:54] It's a great stadium, by the way, in Coney Island. My dad, who was born and died in Coney Island, would always say, "Coney Island's coming back. Coney Island's coming back." And my brother and sister I would always say, oh, there goes Dad again, you know? And then they built this stadium on the side of the old Steeplechase Park in Coney Island. And it's a beautiful stadium, and overlooks the boardwalk and the water. And it's the Mets A Team, their minor league team. And it's very, it's exciting to go there.

[71:30] But it's not exciting to go to Coney Island for a kid who grew up there, in that it's fairly depressing. And I go to this restaurant called Giulio's, and to circle back to the point I was making before about the culture and the effort by my parents to draw me out of it, it was an Italian neighborhood. And when I go to go to Giulio's, and I see a kid by the name of Freddie Orlando, kid I grew up with. He was a good pitcher. I pitched and played center field, so we played ball together. Freddie never left Coney Island. And he never escaped the pull for a lot of Italian American tough guy kids, which was the mob.

[72:14] And I had a father who had been a longshoreman, and grew up hating these people. And so he had, he was a barber at one point, and he had a strap, and he scared the hell out of me. "If I see you walking down the same side of the street with these people, you're going to get the strap." So I was taught, even when I thought I was a little tough guy, that they were not Robin Hoods. They were not good guys. But guys like Freddie Orlando and some of the other guys I grew up with are still there, and they're still, and they're working for these people. And some of them are dead now, killed by these people. So it's depressing, when you see that.

Audience member: [73:04] I'm Rachel. I am a freshman at St. Thomas.

Auletta: [73:08] And you want to be a journalist.

Audience member: [73:10] Yes, I do want to be a journalist.

Auletta: [73:11] And you're going to ask me a hard question?

Audience member: [73:15] OK. I'm going to ask you a very deep question here. So you said that there's two worlds, the traditional media world and the digital media world. And you said that you hope that they'll come together. But when everyone's trying to create their own identity in each, like you said, we have to re brand and such, when everyone's trying to re brand and everything, how are they going to come together?

Auletta: [73:41] Well, they can come together if, for instance, if I am the New York Times. Or I'm the Minneapolis Tribune, let's say. And I want to be able to sell my paper online, right? And I sell it, and I'm losing circulation, I'm losing advertising, I'm shrinking my newsroom budget. I'm in trouble, like a lot of other newspapers. But if I can figure out a way to make money, be it an app, or be it a pay wall, or be it a pay per view model, whatever the model is, I have to use the lingo of the brand. I've extended my brand to the online world.

[74:29] And I've created another revenue stream that I desperately need, because my readers are fleeing and getting information from the Web. I have to be where they are. And by the way, if I can get rid of my print newspaper, I save 70 percent of the costs of my newspaper. The costs, as you've learned with your student newspaper, you didn't have the same costs, but 70 percent of the cost of most newspapers, it's about 60 percent at a paper like the Times, which has more reporters. 70 percent is paper, printing, and distribution. And only roughly 30 percent is your staff. Business and editorial.

[75:12] So if you can extend and get the digital world, which needs your content, because they can't just rely on advertising. And they know that advertisers don't want to put their friendly ads on YouTube, if YouTube is going to show some dog pooping on the street. And you think it's funny, but the advertiser doesn't.

[75:38] So they need professional content in order to sell ads, as well as to create another revenue stream from some kind of subscription model. So I actually have hoped that the two worlds are coming together. Now, how does FOX extend the brand to a digital world? I think that's much more relevant for a newspaper or magazine.

Miller: [76:02] Do you have a Kindle?

Auletta: [76:04] I have a Kindle and iPad.

Miller: [76:05] And an iPad. So which one do you most often read fiction or non fiction on?

Auletta: [76:10] I buy books. When I go on vacation, or I go on a trip, like when I went to Africa or Afghanistan, I bring my BlackBerry. I have a BlackBerry, because I do mostly email. I don't use the phone very much. And I hate the tactile keyboard of the iPhone. I can't do email that way. And the same with the iPad. Actually, the iPad is too heavy to read, I find. So I use the Kindle when I go on trips. And I hate it. And I hate it because it doesn't paginate. It says you are 53 percent done with this book.

Miller: [76:48] They've changed that. They're going to put page numbers on now.

Auletta: [76:51] I hate it. Well, I have an old model. And they don't give you an index.

Miller: [76:54] Yeah, that's right. I know.

Auletta: [76:56] The iPad does both. So it's cooler. But that's what I do.

Miller: [77:02] "I have a Kindle and I hate it." That's the headline.

Auletta: [77:04] For what reason?

Miller: [77:05] No, I'm saying you. I have a Kindle and I like it.

Auletta: [77:07] Oh. No, no, I actually, I don't hate it. I withdraw that statement. I genuinely withdraw it. Because I actually like my Kindle. I have it with me because I'm finishing the George Washington biography, and I'm going to read it on the plane.

[77:23] And I got that because I didn't want to lug that heavy book on a trip. On a trip, you pack four, five, six books, all on the Kindle, so I love it that way. But I love more the iPad. Because the iPad is actually, and I thought the iPad would kill the Kindle, and it hasn't. Because Bezos, head of Amazon, is so brilliant. He just lowered the price. And it's much, you know, a hundred and some odd dollars. It's just brilliant. And it's a dedicated, he believes that people will just want it for books.

[78:01] One of the reasons I love the iPad is that it's multi media. So, if I'm reading the New York Times on it, I see the whole front page of the New York Times, and it's in color. I don't just see one story at a time as I do on the Kindle. And if I press my finger this way, I can see a Charlie Rose interview with Ted Kennedy as I'm reading Ted Kennedy's obituary. If I go like this, I can go back to the archives and read clips on Ted Kennedy. If I go like that, I can read an NPR interview with Ted Kennedy. That's really pretty cool. I mean, it's really multi media. And that's fabulous, but it's very expensive.

Miller: [78:38] Ken, thank you for a very interesting conversation.

Auletta: [78:41] Thank you.