Ken Auletta
Ken Auletta
 
 

About Ken

Ken Auletta launched the Annals of Communications profiles and column for The New Yorker magazine in 1992. He is the author of thirteen 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. Ken is currently reporting a documentary on Murdoch with acclaimed director Matt Tyrnauer, and is also writing about The Murdoch Puzzle.

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Photo by JD Lasica (Creative Commons)

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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

BUY THE BOOK

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. To help understand Donald Trump, read this profile of Roy Cohn.

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

Featured
Robert Rubin Cites Ken's Book "The Underclass" as Most Impactful

Asked by the New York Times, "What book had the greatest impact on you?" former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin cited Ken's 1982 work The Underclass.

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Ken Honored for 40 Years as a National Judge by the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists

Anna Quindlen, author and Livingston Awards judge from 2009 to 2022, presented Auletta with the award and introduced a video with tributes from his fellow Livingston Award judges and past Livingston award winners.

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Auletta Inducted into the New York Journalism Hall of Fame

On March 23, 2023, Ken, along with Robert Caro, Gay Talese, and several others, was inducted into the New York Journalism Hall of Fame by the Society of Professional Journalists. The honor was bestowed at a midtown luncheon hosted by the Deadline Club of New York.

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Hollywood Ending among "Best Books of 2022"

Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence was listed among the top books of 2022 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Esquire

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Recent Praise for Ken's Book Hollywood Ending

Praise for Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, from The New Yorker, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, Kirkus, and more.

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Ken Interviewed by Andy Serwer for Yahoo Finance

In this episode of Influencers, Andy Serwer sits down with Hollywood Ending author Ken Auletta to discuss his book on Harvey Weinstein, Ken's career in journalism, and the future of media.

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Auletta on CBS Sunday Morning

CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl talks with journalist Ken Auletta about "Hollywood Ending," his new biography of disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein (who was convicted for sexual abuse after numerous allegations), and about the film industry's culture of silence. Stahl also talks with former Weinstein assistant Rowena Chiu, who claims her boss tried to rape her.

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The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd Profiles Ken and Hollywood Ending

Maureen Dowd interviewed Ken and his wife, Amanda Urban, for this featured profile, on the occasion of his new book about Harvey Weinstein. “Mr. Auletta’s friends say it’s striking that The New Yorker writer, known to them as one of the nicest people on the planet, longtime captain of the writers’ team at the annual Writers and Artists charity softball game in the Hamptons, wanted to do a deep dive on one of the nastiest people on the planet.”

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Mike Allen in Axios Previews Ken’s New Book

Mike Allen in Axios previewed Ken’s new book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Complicity, a deep dive into the life and career of Harvey Weinstein — how he rose to become one of the most iconic figures in the world of movies, how he used that position to feed his monstrous sexual appetites, and why he was allowed to operate with such impunity for so many years.

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John Carreyrou Interviews Ken on the "Bad Blood” Podcast

In an episode of the Bad Blood podcast, Ken is interviewed by host John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who brilliantly dethroned Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos — and who credits Auletta with asking the tough questions that triggered his interest and would eventually expose her as a fraud.

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Ken talks Murdochs on “Even the Rich” Podcast

Even the Rich podcast co-hosts Brooke Siffrinn and Aricia Skidmore-William “thought we knew everything about the Murdochs. Then we met Ken Auletta. He's one of the best media reporters in the biz — four decades at The New Yorker, a handful of bestsellers under his belt, and quite a few encounters with the Murdochs along the way. He tells us what the family is like up close, and what the future holds for their diminished empire.”

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Ken and Ronan Farrow speak at University of Michigan

In early 2020, the Wallace House at the University of Michigan hosted a talk titled "The Weinstein Effect: Breaking the Stories That Spurred a Movement," in which Ronan Farrow, 2018 Livingston Award winner, and Ken Auletta, Livingston Awards national judge, discuss their individual attempts to get to the truth about Harvey Weinstein and how reporters ultimately stood together in confronting one of the biggest stories in recent memory.

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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)

Ken's Books
 
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