Ken Auletta

Ken Auletta launched the Annals of Communications columns and profiles 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, which was published in November of 2009.

His other books include Backstory: Inside the Business of News; Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire; The Streets Were Paved with Gold; and The Underclass. 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.

Auletta was among the first to popularize the so-called information superhighway with his February 1993 profile of Barry Diller's search for something new. He has profiled the leading figures and companies of the Information Age, including Google, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, AOL Time Warner, John Malone, Harvey Weinstein, the New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg, and Facebook; he has dissected media meteors that fell to earth like "push" technology and inter-active TV, probed media violence, the PAC giving of communication giants, the fat lecture fees earned by journalist/pundits, and explored what "synergy" may mean to journalism.

His 2001 profile of Ted Turner won a National Magazine Award as the best profile of the year. He covered the Microsoft antitrust trial for the magazine. In ranking him as America's premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded, "no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta." New York Magazine described him as the "media Boswell."

His eleventh book, Googled: The End of The World As We Know It, was published in November 2009 and quickly became a bestseller. In narrative fashion, it provides the fullest portrait yet of Google as a company, how it began, and has grown into a behemoth. It seeks to probe the "secret sauce" for Google's success. And it shows how traditional media was late to awaken to Google and the multiple ways the digital revolution would disrupt their world, crowning a new King: the consumer.

His twelfth book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else), was published in 2018. It described how advertising and marketing, with worldwide spending of up to $2 trillion, and without its subsidies, most media, including Google and Facebook, would perish, was today a victim of disruption.

His thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein And The Culture of Silence, to be published in July 2022, is a biography of a Hollywood luminary who behaved like a monster while also birthing brilliant movies. Hollywood Ending seeks to uncover what made him a monster, how a culture of silence shielded his foul behavior and the nature of his talent. Readers will be exposed to a surprising array of voices—including those of Harvey Weinstein, his brother Bob, and childhood friends who describe the atmosphere in the brothers’ Flushing, Queens home—and documents that demonstrate how Harvey Weinstein’s inability to control his raging impulses crippled his business.

Auletta has won numerous journalism honors. He has been chosen a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and one of the 20th Century's top 100 business journalists by a distinguished national panel of peers. Appearing before the Financial Writers Association of America in 1997, Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger turned to him and declared, "I really think that the kind of stuff you do for The New Yorker is terrific. I'd love to see more of that kind of stuff on the front page of the Wall Street Journal... I think you set a standard."

For four decades, Auletta has been a national judge of the Livingston Awards for journalists under thirty-five. He has been a Trustee and member of the Executive Committee of the Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. He was a member of the Columbia Journalism School Task Force assembled by incoming college President Lee Bollinger to help reshape the curriculum.

He has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror and a Trustee of the Nightingale-Bamford School. He was twice a Trustee of PEN, the international writers' organization. He is a member of the New York Public Library's Emergency Committee for the Research Libraries, the Author's Guild, PEN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and of the Committee to Protect Journalists.