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Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media
The distinguished columnist and author of Burn Rate offers a trenchant study of the media industry, its rise and fall, and the titans responsible for its imminent collapse. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
- GenresNonfiction
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
Michael Wolff
31 books628 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Michael Wolff is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.
In January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.
Michael Wolff is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.
In January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 24, 2011
It's probably not fair to want as much from this book as I did, since it's really just collected gossip columns about media people (many of whom have faded in the few years since it was published). But Wolff sometimes ventures into rant territory, where he is clearly not just amused by bothered by the fact that we decided to treat media - and content - as a business like any other, and there's a very good case to be made that it's just not. Economies of scale, cost savings, upward sloping growth, none of these things are really relevant in a lot of media (or even the production of content). But we never get an in-depth look at that, just some childish if amusing depictions of the men who built these empires.
August 13, 2019
Not a good book
The book just try to sell on controversy. The author seems to be all-knowing and only presenting everyone else in a bad light. The book doesn't seem to be written in a good taste. Moreover, his predictions doesn't seem to true considering the current realities.
The book just try to sell on controversy. The author seems to be all-knowing and only presenting everyone else in a bad light. The book doesn't seem to be written in a good taste. Moreover, his predictions doesn't seem to true considering the current realities.
September 3, 2019
Self-indulgent, but fun with some keen insight
It is an irony, a special irony appreciated only by me, that during the period in the early seventies when Michael Wolff went to work as a copy boy for the New York Times, a headhunter was gently explaining to me that because I had only an undergraduate degree from UCLA and not, e.g., a master's in journalism from Columbia, that I had no chance of being hired by the New York Times, and indeed would not even be interviewed. Instead I went to work for the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press while Wolff went on to become a best-selling writer and a columnist for New York magazine.
I mention this personal note since what Autumn of the Moguls is all about is, quite frankly, Michael Wolff. Indeed in the annals of self-indulgent and largely rhetorical tomes about media, Wolff has here something close to a singular achievement, something to rival (in its way) the memoirs of many a Hollywood movie producer. This is a book ostensibly about media wheelers and dealers, the money men who divide and conquer, merge and squeeze while manufacturing low-interest loans and golden parachutes for themselves. Yet Wolff's style is to concentrate on how the moguls have sought him out, how he has been invited to expensive shindigs ("I found myself on the Forbes family yacht" p. 75), while maintaining the acumen to see through their posturings and stupidities. Having established his authority--and to his credit he admits to having lost a buck or two in media deals himself--Wolff then digresses and digresses and then returns to the story, as leisurely as a patriarch at dinner with his heirs. Of course, as necessity has it, Wolff's observations and critiques are strictly after the fact. I suspect that some of the moguls mentioned herein might say that Wolff has raised Monday morning quarterbacking to an ethereal plain.
Still there is some fun to be had here and there are some tidbits worth savoring, although sometimes he becomes too enamored of his own coinages, such as when he uses "Zeitgeisty" on consecutive pages 46 and 47, or when he too frequently employs trendy words like "arrivistes." His use of paragraphing and sentence fragments for emphasis is also a bit overdone. More often however, Wolff demonstrates a gift for striking turns of phrase that unfortunately may or may not really mean anything but do indeed catch the ear, like something from Marshall McLuhan without the academic gloss. For example, he writes on page 30, "The media is...in the business of being noticed by the media." Or, "Brand is about access to media." (p. 29) Or, "the larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it." (p. 95) Or, even, "Ubiquity has become the main media standard." [paragraph break] "So this is elemental: The more available content is, the inherently less valuable it is." (p. 278)
I'm not sure that these "insights" rank with McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message," which was the then sensational title of the first chapter of Understanding Media (1964); or with the more profound understanding McLuhan reached three years later with the publication of The Medium is the Massage. Note that that's "message" first and then "massage." The media first tried to nullify content by becoming the message itself, and then realized that massaging the masses with couch potato content was an even surer way to make a buck.
However Wolff is not interested in such crass academic cynicism. Although he mentions McLuhan once in passing and, although he too is less interested in what the media publishes than what it is, his real mentor is David Halberstam who wrote a best-seller on the media business in 1979 called, The Powers that Be (not coincidentally the title of Wolff's fourth chapter). Wolff opines, "Many of us, I'll wager, came into the media business, rather than, say, government or academia, because of The Powers that Be." (p. 38)
In other words, it was the romance of media that seduced Wolff, and it is the romance of media expansion, merger and consolidation that fascinates him today. And (putting Wolff himself aside for the moment) that is what this book is ultimately all about: the politics, the grandeur, the power, and the romance of media; about how media has replaced politics, how it has become "a more influential force in our lives...than politics or government ever was" (p. 28); how in fact Wolff can write: "I don't believe any greater power has ever existed" (p. 30)
Well, hyperbole aside, Wolff's thesis that media today is more powerful than it has ever been, and that it is a cultural and political force to test the power of government, our schools and churches, and all the other institutions of society is one to be taken seriously. It is all the more alarming (to the extent that Wolff's observations are accurate) to discover in these pages the self-centered and purely acquisitive mentality of the moguls who run the media business and control its content.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
It is an irony, a special irony appreciated only by me, that during the period in the early seventies when Michael Wolff went to work as a copy boy for the New York Times, a headhunter was gently explaining to me that because I had only an undergraduate degree from UCLA and not, e.g., a master's in journalism from Columbia, that I had no chance of being hired by the New York Times, and indeed would not even be interviewed. Instead I went to work for the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press while Wolff went on to become a best-selling writer and a columnist for New York magazine.
I mention this personal note since what Autumn of the Moguls is all about is, quite frankly, Michael Wolff. Indeed in the annals of self-indulgent and largely rhetorical tomes about media, Wolff has here something close to a singular achievement, something to rival (in its way) the memoirs of many a Hollywood movie producer. This is a book ostensibly about media wheelers and dealers, the money men who divide and conquer, merge and squeeze while manufacturing low-interest loans and golden parachutes for themselves. Yet Wolff's style is to concentrate on how the moguls have sought him out, how he has been invited to expensive shindigs ("I found myself on the Forbes family yacht" p. 75), while maintaining the acumen to see through their posturings and stupidities. Having established his authority--and to his credit he admits to having lost a buck or two in media deals himself--Wolff then digresses and digresses and then returns to the story, as leisurely as a patriarch at dinner with his heirs. Of course, as necessity has it, Wolff's observations and critiques are strictly after the fact. I suspect that some of the moguls mentioned herein might say that Wolff has raised Monday morning quarterbacking to an ethereal plain.
Still there is some fun to be had here and there are some tidbits worth savoring, although sometimes he becomes too enamored of his own coinages, such as when he uses "Zeitgeisty" on consecutive pages 46 and 47, or when he too frequently employs trendy words like "arrivistes." His use of paragraphing and sentence fragments for emphasis is also a bit overdone. More often however, Wolff demonstrates a gift for striking turns of phrase that unfortunately may or may not really mean anything but do indeed catch the ear, like something from Marshall McLuhan without the academic gloss. For example, he writes on page 30, "The media is...in the business of being noticed by the media." Or, "Brand is about access to media." (p. 29) Or, "the larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it." (p. 95) Or, even, "Ubiquity has become the main media standard." [paragraph break] "So this is elemental: The more available content is, the inherently less valuable it is." (p. 278)
I'm not sure that these "insights" rank with McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message," which was the then sensational title of the first chapter of Understanding Media (1964); or with the more profound understanding McLuhan reached three years later with the publication of The Medium is the Massage. Note that that's "message" first and then "massage." The media first tried to nullify content by becoming the message itself, and then realized that massaging the masses with couch potato content was an even surer way to make a buck.
However Wolff is not interested in such crass academic cynicism. Although he mentions McLuhan once in passing and, although he too is less interested in what the media publishes than what it is, his real mentor is David Halberstam who wrote a best-seller on the media business in 1979 called, The Powers that Be (not coincidentally the title of Wolff's fourth chapter). Wolff opines, "Many of us, I'll wager, came into the media business, rather than, say, government or academia, because of The Powers that Be." (p. 38)
In other words, it was the romance of media that seduced Wolff, and it is the romance of media expansion, merger and consolidation that fascinates him today. And (putting Wolff himself aside for the moment) that is what this book is ultimately all about: the politics, the grandeur, the power, and the romance of media; about how media has replaced politics, how it has become "a more influential force in our lives...than politics or government ever was" (p. 28); how in fact Wolff can write: "I don't believe any greater power has ever existed" (p. 30)
Well, hyperbole aside, Wolff's thesis that media today is more powerful than it has ever been, and that it is a cultural and political force to test the power of government, our schools and churches, and all the other institutions of society is one to be taken seriously. It is all the more alarming (to the extent that Wolff's observations are accurate) to discover in these pages the self-centered and purely acquisitive mentality of the moguls who run the media business and control its content.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
June 7, 2021
I have been working my way through Michael Wolff’s Autumn of the Moguls and found some of it very predictable. Its obsession with disfunctionality amongst business leaders including Eisner and Messier.One thing that did strike a chord with me was the way technology had moved from saving the record industry from itself to becoming the industry’s kryptonite. Around about 1984 or so, the music industry had hit paydirt as Joe Public moved from their analogue recordings on 8-tracks, cassettes and vinyl on to CDs. Artists of the 1960s and 1970s were the money spinners, reputedly there was one CD factory in Germany that did nothing but make copies of Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon.
Then the internet came along and the record companies were slow to take advantage of this technology so the consumers did. Instead the industry created a huge knee jerk reaction blaming the customer for their own mistakes. From pages 283 and 284:
File sharing replaced radio as the engine of music culture.
It wasn’t just that it was free music – radio offered free music. But whatever you wanted was free, whenever you wanted it. The Internet is music consumerism run amok, resulting not only in billions of dollars in lost sales but in an endless bifurcation of taste. The universe fragmented into subuniverses, and then sub-subuniverses. The music industry, which depends on large numbers of people with similar interests for its profit margins, now had to deal with an ever-growing number of fans with increasingly diverse and eccentric interests.
Not a unique challenge, clothes manufacturers, car companies et cetera all have had to deal with the fragmentation of consumer interests. There is no longer any such thing as the teenager, when do people now get old? These are all similar challenges. The fear isn’t piracy, its the ability of these businesses to manage themselves and adjust to a post modern society.
Then the internet came along and the record companies were slow to take advantage of this technology so the consumers did. Instead the industry created a huge knee jerk reaction blaming the customer for their own mistakes. From pages 283 and 284:
File sharing replaced radio as the engine of music culture.
It wasn’t just that it was free music – radio offered free music. But whatever you wanted was free, whenever you wanted it. The Internet is music consumerism run amok, resulting not only in billions of dollars in lost sales but in an endless bifurcation of taste. The universe fragmented into subuniverses, and then sub-subuniverses. The music industry, which depends on large numbers of people with similar interests for its profit margins, now had to deal with an ever-growing number of fans with increasingly diverse and eccentric interests.
Not a unique challenge, clothes manufacturers, car companies et cetera all have had to deal with the fragmentation of consumer interests. There is no longer any such thing as the teenager, when do people now get old? These are all similar challenges. The fear isn’t piracy, its the ability of these businesses to manage themselves and adjust to a post modern society.
October 2, 2019
Tedious, self indulgent, self promoting, often fawning look at some of the media and dot com barons, notably Rupert Murdoch.
March 17, 2017
Entertaining read.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews