"I was a working-class kid from Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York ... I was never very interested in my schoolwork, but I was a reasonable athlete, so the baseball coach got me into the only college that would take me. I became a little more serious there, began to read books, did graduate school in political science, thinking I would work in government, be a diplomat or something like that. I worked for Bobby Kennedy and after that as a speech writer and then campaign manager for a man who ran for governor of New York. And with my help, he lost."
He enjoyed the speech writing enough that writing occurred to him as a good career direction, and with his political experience, he was able to get a job writing about politics for The New York Post.
In those days - "this was before Murdoch bought it" - the Post was a liberal newspaper, and a plausible employer for someone who had worked for the liberal Bobby Kennedy, but Auletta didn't last there very long.
"I had a falling-out with the publisher within a couple of weeks; she killed my first column."
He laughs. "It was about some of her friends."
He went on to write for the Village Voice and New York magazine, until the conservative mogul Rupert Murdoch made it clear that he had New York in his sights for acquisition.
"When Murdoch made his bid for the magazine in 1977, a group of us went on strike trying to defeat him. We failed, he won, I quit. After that I was hired by The New Yorker, to write mostly on politics at first. But I moved around and wrote on lots of different things."
He's been writing the magazine's "Annals of Communication" column since 1993.
Of the dizzying changes that have overtaken media of all kinds in the decades since Auletta's writing career began, the most obvious and immediate is digital disruption. His book on the evolution of Google is admiring, though not uncritical - he opens by flatly stating his impatience with "companies that spend too much time whining about Google and too little time devising an offence. Most old media companies were inexcusably slow to wake up."
But Auletta, of course, has been employed since the 70s by old media companies, and he has a keen appreciation of the difficulties journalism - like the music business, and the film business, and the television business, and the publishing business - faces.
"Everyone has to have a digital presence now. The public wants information instantly. But do they want to pay for it? The New York Times, which arguably is the best newspaper in the world, is losing circulation and advertising from its print newspaper faster than it's gaining revenue for its digital newspaper. If they could suspend publication on the print newspaper and just exist digitally they'd save 60 per cent of their costs.
"But the problem is that The Times makes almost all of its money from its print version. And that's true of almost all newspapers. That's the conundrum. The Times has 1100 reporters. It's very hard to see how five to 10 years from now they can afford that."
When he was researching his Google book, Auletta asked Google co-founder Larry Page about the future of journalism in the digital era. Google's search algorithm gives a lot of weight to results from prestigious publications like The Times or The Washington Post; clearly, if it wants to provide good information, it's useful for the company that good journalism exists. So in the long run, is Google cutting its own throat?
"Page said, 'I worry about this. How do I preserve those serious papers and help them? I'm really thinking about it.' So, months later I invited him to The New Yorker festival, thinking I'll get him on stage and I'll interview him about this, see what he's come up with. He didn't respond. I think his short attention span shortened, and he focused on other things. I had a similar conversation with Sheryl Sandberg, who's the number two at Facebook, years ago when I was writing a profile on her. She was offered a job at The Washington Post before she went to Facebook, and she wrestled with it, she told me, but she ultimately decided she couldn't fix it. The digital world was going to overwhelm traditional journalism and she didn't see a way to make a profit-making institution out of The Washington Post. Now that's scary."
Ken Auletta will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 13-17
