Ken Auletta
 
 

About Ken

Ken Auletta launched the Annals of Communications column for The New Yorker magazine in 1992. He is the author of twelve books, including five national bestsellers—Three blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Super Highway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It. His twelfth book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else), was published in June 2018. His thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, was published in July 2022.

 

Photo by JD Lasica (Creative Commons)

Ken_Auletta_(3012259270).jpg

LATEST BOOK

ONE OF THE “Best of 2022” : The NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, ESQUIRE

HOLLYWOOD ENDING:
Harvey Weinstein and the CuLTURE OF SILENCE

Read an excerpt in The New Yorker


In Production

The Murdoch Puzzle

Endlessly fascinated by Rupert Murdoch, Ken is working on a filmed documentary entitled The Murdoch Puzzle. Ken is partnered with award-winning documentarian Matt Tyrnauer, who's documentaries have included Where's My Roy Cohn? and Valentino: The Last Emperor, which was short-listed for an Academy Award, and with Radical Media, whose documentaries have won two Academy Awards. Below, Ken’s celebrated New Yorker profile of the media mogul, from 1995.

THE PIRATE

THE NEW YORKER - NOVEMBER 13, 1995

Rupert Murdoch is sixty-four, and his shoulders stoop slightly. His voice is soft, and his manner is unfailingly courteous, as he sits with one leg tucked under the other. Only the hard brown eyes suggest that he is a predator. Murdoch is the chairman, C.E.O., and principal shareholder of a company, the News Corporation, that produced nearly nine billion dollars in revenue this year and more than a billion in profits, but he feels frustrated. He is frustrated by China. He is frustrated because he has no international news network to supply his Fox network here, or his Sky or Star satellite services in Europe and Asia, while Ted Turner has CNN. And until last month he was frustrated because he owned the rights to televise sporting events all over the world but didn’t own a sports network, like ESPN.

PLUS, FROM The New Yorker - December 2017: The Hidden Succession News in Rupert Murdoch’s Sale of Fox Entertainment to Disney


FEATURED ARTICLES

Harvey Weinstein’s Last Campaign

The New Yorker - May 30, 2022

How the Hollywood producer lost control of the story during his criminal trial in New York. An excerpt from the new book Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence.

HOW THE MATH MEN OVERTHREW THE MAD MEN

THE NEW YORKER - MAY 21, 2018

Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence.

DON’T MESS WITH ROY COHN

ESQUIRE - DECEMBER 1978

In the Trump era, Ken's celebrated profile of Roy Cohn was widely discussed. A ruthless master of dirty tricks who smeared the reputations of his political enemies, Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing in the 1970s and tutored him in the dark arts of gossip, power, and politics.

OUTSIDE THE BOX

THE NEW YORKER - FEBRUARY 3, 2014

A profile of Netflix CEO and founder, Reed Hastings. In 2000 Netflix had only about three hundred thousand subscribers and relied on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver its DVDs; the company was losing money. Hastings proposed a sale to Blockbuster. Blockbuster wasn’t interested. What a momentous business mistake.


RECENT News about Ken


 
 

An intimate and profound reckoning with the changes buffeting the $2 trillion global advertising and marketing business from the perspective of its most powerful players, by the bestselling author of Googled

 

FRENEMIES

THE EPIC DISRUPTION OF THE AD BUSINESS
(AND EVERYTHING ELSE)

 
frenemies-cover.jpg