At $4 a pop — via Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles’ Nook stores — “Rupert Murdoch, The Master Mogul of Fleet Street” costs less than a single copy of the print magazine.

It’s also a bargain if you’re a fan of Murdoch biographer (and non-baseball expert) Michael Wolff, whose work accounts for 20 percent of the copy here.

In other PhoneGate news, News Corp. has told employees at its New York Post tabloid to “preserve and maintain” any documents related to phone hacking.

News Corp., which also owns this Web site, has maintained that none of the systemic voicemail hacking that has come to light at its News of the World tabloid occurred in the U.S., but investigators will be looking into the matter, regardless.

The last one means Wolff is particularly in demand these days, which is why he showed up to the BBC’s satellite studio in New York today.

The Beeb had other (unintentional) plans. You must watch this clip:

As Sky News reminds us, this is not the first time the BBC has brought the wrong dude on camera. Here’s a clip of Guy Goma, who had shown up to a BBC studio for a job interview in 2006, and was instead put on air and asked about Apple.

(Not terribly necessary disclosure in this case: Both Sky News and this Web site are owned by News Corp., the company at the center of the scandal that prompted Wolff to go on air today.)

It’s the news that this story should have run in the New York Post last week.

NYT reporter Tim Arango reports that Wolff is still feuding with News Corp., which owns the Post, as well as this site, over a 2008 Rupert Murdoch biography. The beef is serious enough, Arango says (he intimates, to be precise), that Post media ace Keith Kelly wasn’t able to publish a scoop about Wolff’s move:

Elsewhere in the tabloid’s pages, Mr. Wolff’s name is not so welcome. Last week Mr. Wolff spoke to Keith J. Kelly, the paper’s media columnist, about his new job, but no article was published.

Ouch. Arango himself is a veteran of the Post’s media desk, so he certainly knows the terrain here. But really? Doesn’t news trump all?

I asked Wolff about it, via e-mail. “You’ll have to ask Keith about that (and I would love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation),” he writes.

Kelly, alas, also declined to comment, and passed me on to Post editor-in-chief Col Allan. I’ve yet to hear back from Allan, and I’ve asked News Corp. PR folks for comment as well, just for good measure. Happy to include their responses if I get them.

I’m sure Waxman will want to respond to some or all of what Wolff says–in particular, his intimation that she wrote a positive piece about Starbucks (SBUX) founder Howard Schultz when she was at the New York Times (NYT) in order to secure Schultz’s investment in her new business. So if and when she answers on her own site, I’ll link to that here.

If for some reason you’re one of those people who cares about this stuff but doesn’t like to read, you’re in luck: Wolff says he and Waxman will go head-to-head on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” this Sunday. In the meantime, here’s some prep video:

Waxman’s volley comes via a cease-and-desist note her site sent to Newser today, embedded below. It comes after a series of back and forths between the two sites, which you can follow here, here and here. Very short version: Waxman says Wolff’s site steals her stuff without attribution; Wolff says his company does attribute the stuff, in some form.

The bigger picture is that the debate about “content creation” and “aggregation,” both of which are pretty ugly and imprecise terms, is just getting started. Even though we’re either 15 years or 40 years into the Internet era, depending on how you want to count. (Probably best to go with 15).

This isn’t the first time Wolff has gotten legal notes from publishers. In February 2009, the New York Times (NYT) complained about Newser’s use of the Times’s iconic “T,” as well as the use of its photos.

Waxman’s argument with Wolff is that Newser either doesn’t link to her site or does it in a way that makes it unlikely that a reader will end up on one of her pages. She’s fine with aggregation in practice, she says, noting that her site repurposes other people’s stories. And it’s worth noting that she’s not firing off an angry letter at the Huffington Post, an aggregator that also uses her stuff extensively.

“There’s a principle here,” she says. “And if everybody who aggregated aggregated the way they do it, we’d all be in a bunch of trouble.”

So what does she expect Wolff and company to do now? “I don’t know,” she says. But “we’re serious… I hope they take it seriously.”

Wolff’s response, via email: “This is a joke letter about a joke allegation based on a joke premise from a joke law firm (in Cleveland at that). Waxman is just looking for press to help her raise a new round of financing. Nothing here is serious.”

Cease and Desist letter from TheWrap to Newser

[Image credit: barnabus]

First, CBS (CBS) digital dealmaker Quincy Smith and crew formally unveiled Code Advisors, the M&A shop they’ve been assembling for nearly a year. Now comes Michael Wolf, last seen in the halls of MTV Networks, where he was COO for a bit more than a year.

That was all the way back in 2007, but Wolf’s contract with Viacom (VIA) kept him more or less tied up until 2010. Now he’s opening up his own shop: Activate, a boutique media and tech consulting firm.

That’s a return to form for Wolf, who made his reputation as a tech-savvy media consultant at both Booz Allen and McKinsey (for a time capsule that’s also 100 percent up to date, see Kurt Andersen’s 1997 New Yorker profile of Wolf). He says he’s self-funding the operation, and won’t need to take on investors, as he already has paying clients (whom he won’t name).

He also has a co-worker: Anil Dash, the longtime veteran of blogging software pioneer Six Apart, who is now a director at Expert Labs. Dash says he’ll keep his job at the nonprofit, which is a sort of tech/good government mashup, and split his time between that and Wolf’s shop.

And yes, just because people still mix them up–Wolf is not Michael Wolff, the bomb-throwing media agitator/aggregator. That’s this guy.

• News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch tried to lower expectations that his Fox broadcast network would hire Conan O’Brien.
• Murdoch hinted that his book publishing unit is in line to get a new deal on e-books from Amazon, just as Macmillan has demanded (as will other publishers).

On the second point, here’s my on-the-fly transcription and paraphrasing of Murdoch’s comments about Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL) and e-book pricing. It’s one of the most candid descriptions you’ll hear from a top executive about Big Media’s reluctance to embrace digital distribution at the expense of its existing system and revenue:

“We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….We think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books. We’re not against electronic books; on the contrary, we like them very much” because they cost us less to distribute, “but we want some room to maneuver.” The Apple deal…“does allow some flexibility and higher prices” though e-books will still be lower than print versions. And now Amazon is willing to sit down with us again and renegotiate.

UPDATE: Here’s a more complete transcript from Seeking Alpha:

We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99. They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books. We are not against [inaudible] books. On the contrary we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on. But we want some room to maneuver in it. Amazon, sorry Apple in its agreement with us which has not been disclosed in detail does allow for a variety of slightly higher prices.

There will be prices very much less than the printed copies of books but still will not be fixed in a way that Amazon has been doing it. It appears that Amazon is now ready to sit down with us again and renegotiate pricing.

Again, it’s impossible to stress how scarring the music labels’ experience has been for Big Media. And they’re determined not to repeat the experience. Their takeaway, though, seems to be that they can stave off digital distribution by keeping prices high and inventory relatively scarce. Hard to believe consumers are going to go for that.

Earlier

A first glimpse at News Corp.’s fourth-quarter earnings (which, due to the company’s weird fiscal calendar, is technically the company’s Q2 for 2010): Pretty good. And much better than a year ago (thankfully). After factoring out one-time charges, the company posted earnings of 25 cents on revenue of $8.7 billion.

The Street was looking for earnings of 20 cents on revenue of $8.23 billion, and analysts were also hoping the company would boost its earnings forecast, due in part to a bump from the ginormous success of “Avatar.” No word on guidance in the earnings release, though.

I’ll pick through the release for other worthwhile nuggets for the next few minutes. And then the real show begins at 4:30 Eastern, when the company’s earnings call–easily the most entertaining one in its peer group due to the censor-free presence of CEO Rupert Murdoch–begins. We’ll be looking for commentary on his battle/negotiation with Google (GOOG), upcoming content deals with Apple and the iPad, his thoughts on paid content in general, a dash of political commentary or two, and an update on the turnaround effort at MySpace.

From the release: A pretty nice quarter at most of the conglomerate’s divisions, including the previously battered broadcast TV and newspaper groups. News Corp. says print revenue at The Wall Street Journal was up five percent and ads on the Journal’s digital network were up 17 percent.

MySpace and the company’s other digital properties, shuffled into the “other” category, don’t get much of a mention, but don’t seem to have done much, not surprisingly.

But News Corp does mention that digital media earnings were down $32 million compared with a year ago, “principally due to lower search and advertising revenue.” And the company lost $29 million on “digital media dispositions”–i.e., the fire sale/giveaways of properties like Rotten Tomatoes and Photobucket.

Here’s the breakdown by segment (click table to enlarge):

Liveblog

CFO Dave DeVoe: “Extremely pleased” with the quarter.

Movies: Revenue up due to decent DVD sales (no MGM problem here). Also high costs due to “Avatar,” but big profits from the movie will be coming in during the next couple quarters.

Broadcast TV: Local ads are improving; the telecom, fast food, finance categories are all improving.

Cable: Revenue is up 18 percent. Affiliate revenue is up 21 percent (more money for Fox News subs), and there was a “single-digit” boost in ad dollars.

Newspapers: Journal dollars are up, operating costs down. Ad revenue got better as the quarter progressed.

Books: Revenue up, expenses down.

“Other”/MySpace: Digital media revenue down, but cost-cutting helped trim losses.

News Corp. is boosting its dividend by 25 percent.

Guidance: The company’s operating income growth rate is expected to grow from single digits to the high teens. Better than anticipated: Film group, TV and cable. But revenue goals for digital media, including MySpace, will take longer than anticipated.

Murdoch sings the praises of content. [I will not argue with him, for now]. “Avatar” is awesome, he says, a “harbinger of fundamental change in the industry.” Also really good: “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Fun to hear Rupe say “Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

WSJ is the No.1 paper in U.S. in terms of circulation, influence, quality. WSJ.com is a “digital model for newspapers around the world.”

Fox News Channel’s audience is both “loyal and lucrative.” Roger Ailes is doing an “admirable job” [translation: Bite me, Michael Wolff--the author of a recent Murdoch biography].

Last year, Murdoch says, News Corp.’s pay-to-play ideas sounded nutty, but now “the content clan has gathered around our ideas.” Consumers must pay and will pay “to be entertained and informed.” All those awesome new gadgets being made in China and sold at the Consumer Electronics Show need content or they’re worthless. Content, content, content. Get it? Content, content, content.

Murdoch says he’ll be wringing more dollars from cable operators. And “when it comes to online news, we’ll be changing that model too,” adding that News Corp. is in “substantive conversations with device makers on developing subscription models” to deliver content. And don’t forget about 3-D!

Not performing well but “long-term growth drivers”: Sky Italia satellite service. Also Sky Deutschland. And MySpace is “not yet where we want it.” In the last quarter, however, MySpace “started to see signs of traffic stabilization.”

Shout-outs for Chase Carey and other managers (but not by name).

Q&A

Question: How big a deal is retransmission consent in coming years? $40 million a month? $100 million a month?

Chase Carey: No numbers, but it’s going to be a “transforming event.” We have two of top 10 distributors done, more coming. It’s a three- or four-year process to knock these deals out.

Q: Does this fix the broadcast model?

Carey: “Yes, I guess you could say simplistically, it fixes it.”

Q: What’s the timing on an “Avatar” DVD, and what about a sequel? Also, how do TV ads look this year?

Murdoch: For “Avatar,” we think about 60 percent of profits will be in the next six months. Which means the DVD will be coming “as soon as possible,” but the movie will stay in cinemas for a while because we’re doing huge dollars in theaters still. Sequel? “Very early talks about it. Jim has ideas for one. We haven’t come to any agreement with him….Being Jim Cameron, I wouldn’t hold your breath for an early one.” Asked about the economics of a future release (“Will you keep the same revenue split?”), Rupe sort of rumbles and growls and sort of doesn’t have much to say. “Ask anybody; it is very easy to drop a $100 million in a hurry on a film, and we’d like to lay off some of the risk.”

Carey: TV trends for this year are “positive.”

Murdoch: TV stations will be up 18 or 19 percent, but last year was terrible. We’re still down compared with two years ago. Hard to see more than a quarter in advance. In newspapers, it’s hard to see more than a few weeks.

[Missed a question on Sky Italia here.]

Q: What are growth prospects for cable networks? They’ve been driven a lot recently by new subscriber fees. How much longer can you get those boosts?

Murdoch: Overall, “we think we have great potential for growth. Quite a long way to go yet.” Look at how NBCU’s USA is growing.

Carey: In the U.S., we’re moving to “quality over quantity”–we can wring more out of foreign exchange, etc. Fox News is only getting more powerful; it has “great upside.”

Q: Regarding newspapers, what growth came from organic increase versus currency fluctuations?

The majority is from foreign exchange.

Q: Does your guidance assume that the “Avatar” DVD is coming in the next two quarters?

Murdoch: “Yes, but it won’t be 3-D” [which I don't think the analyst was asking about].

Q: Back to retransmission consent: You’ve been getting more and more money from cable guys. Why can’t you get $4 or $5 per subscription for Fox broadcast subs?

Murdoch: “We’re modest people.”

Carey: Hyuk, hyuk. Real answer: It takes time. “We try to approach this constructively. We’ve built businesses with [cable guys], we’ve built valuable cable channels” [translation: patience!]. We want to extract more without killing the cable guys.

Murdoch: That said, we’re asking for the same thing [for broadcast channels] that the cable networks are getting, which “certainly won’t kill the cable companies.”

Q: Please talk about value of film libraries (i.e., MGM). They’re generating big operating profits for cable now. How long will this last?

Murdoch: Regarding the MGM auction, “you can count us out of that one altogether” because others will pay more than we’re willing. And we’re not pursuing the Miramax catalog at all.

Carey: A film library by itself, without new stuff coming through, is a “depreciating asset.”

Q: On guidance: You say the ad market getting better, etc., but it sounds like you’re saying Ebidta growth is slowing.

Murdoch: “We honestly do not have any visibility about the last quarter.”

Q: On books/e-books/Apple, what’s going on with that?

Murdoch: We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….We think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books. We’re not against electronic books; on the contrary, we like them very much, lower costs to us, but we want some room to maneuver. The Apple deal does allow “some flexibility and higher prices” though e-books will still be lower than print. And now Amazon is willing to sit down with us again.

Press Q&A

Q: What’s up with plans to charge for newspapers on the Web?

Murdoch: “Not ready to announce yet [long pause]. We won’t be ready yet to make an announcement.” A “lot of talks with a lot of people.” There will be more to say within the next two months, Murdoch adds.

Q: Are you still going to fall $100 million short on the Google deal?

Murdoch: Yes. People using social networks don’t use search a great deal. Facebook has seen this, too. It’s “really too early to make confident predictions…but from going down, we’re beginning to go up.”

Q: Can we get some details about Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal?

Nope.

What about Conan O’Brien on late night?

Murdoch: If the programming people can show us we can do it and make a profit on it, we’ll do it in a flash. I’m sure there have been conversations with Conan, but “if you mean real negotiations, no.”

[Missed two questions here.]

Q: Another late-night question: If you do go into negotiations with Conan, how do you placate your affiliates?

Murdoch: It’s a different deal than NBC. They screwed up 10 pm, which reduced the lead-in to local news. Our affiliates run syndicated programming at 11:30, though, so it will take time to adjust there.

Call ended. This one seemed short to me.

More or less redundant disclosure: News Corp. (NWS) owns this Web site.

That’s the takeaway from a Congressional hearing yesterday, where some industry executives pleaded their case–specifically, that they need a change in antitrust law to survive.

But if they were thinking that the Obama administration would be receptive to that sort of thing, they got a swift rebuke. Associated Press:

“Newspapers, however rare and financially weak, can adapt and ultimately conquer the threat posed by the Internet, the Justice Department’s Carl Shapiro told a House panel.

‘We do not believe any new exemptions for newspapers are necessary,’ said Shapiro, an assistant attorney general for economics.”

And Congress itself wasn’t any more sympathetic. Yet.

I do wonder, however, how this will change over time. Even in a best-case scenario, we’re going to see lots of newspapers shuttering over the next few years. Professional bomb-thrower Michael Wolff’s prediction that 80 percent of papers will fold within 18 months is too high, but I’ve talked to much more sober folks who think we could still lose a third of our daily papers within a few years.

Those papers are increasingly irrelevant to many of their readers, but they retain an awful lot of political clout. So the issue may be more resonant in 12 months once we’ve seen more papers actually shutter. That still won’t get the papers a Wall Street-sized bailout, but a change in antitrust law won’t seem unthinkable then.

He’s right. But Stelter’s piece doesn’t mention one of the publishers that has been increasingly vocal about aggregators–his bosses at the New York Times.

Over the past few months, the paper has reached out several times to aggregators for a variety of offenses, and asked them to cut it out. To date, the Times hasn’t done anything more threatening than mailing a formal letter. But some other publishers, who see the Times as a leading voice for “old media” institutions on the Web, are hoping they might.

• In November, Times officials angrily complained to executives at the Huffington Post after that site republished a complicated graphic the paper had created for its coverage of the 2008 elections. HuffPo CEO Betsy Morgan says the issue was resolved, and that she considers the paper an “important partner.”

• The paper has also complained to Silicon Alley Insider editor Henry Blodget this year after he excerpted one of its stories at length. Blodget refers to the incident in a post he wrote today about the site’s excerpting policy: “We have been publishing for 20 months now–more than 25,000 posts–and we have been asked to shorten excerpts only twice. (We did so immediately.)” (Disclosure: I am a former employee of the site’s parent company, Silicon Alley Media, and own a small number of shares in the company.)

• In February, the Times complained to Michael Wolff’s Newser aggregator about the site’s use of a Times photo and its continued use of the paper’s iconic “T” to identify Times stories it summarizes. Wolff says he’ll stop using the logo if the paper insists.

Does any of this represent a concerted effort by the Times to dissuade sites from linking to and excerpting its copy? I asked spokeswoman Catherine Mathis this last week, and she demurred: “We are not taking a different stance toward aggregators,” she said, via email.

That hasn’t stopped other Web publishers from wishing the paper would do so. They’re hoping that the Times, which publishes the world’s best-read online newspaper, will somehow lead a charge to make it harder for aggregators to use their work.

Keep dreaming. Even if the Times wanted to do bottle up its content, it couldn’t–like it or not, information really does want to be free on the Web, no matter how much it costs to create it. And I get the impression that the paper’s executives, who are frequently lampooned as clueless dinosaurs who “don’t get” the complexities of the Web, understand that.

You can, however, effectively control how quickly the bulk of your proprietary stuff gets released to the public, if you really want to. That’s what The Wall Street Journal (owned by Dow Jones, the News Corp. property that also owns this site) has effectively done so far with its free/pay hybrid model. And the Times may one day try a version of that–again–itself.

That seems to be the lesson in a flap between the paper and Newser, an aggregation site whose motto is “Read Less, Know More.” Newser, which links to and summarizes work from news sources from around the Web, routinely uses a logo from the source site as a visual shorthand. See example below.

If you clicked on the image, you’d find a Newser page with a two-paragraph summary of the Times story; the summary cites the paper and links back to the original article. Not good enough, according to a letter the paper’s legal department sent to Newser earlier this month.

Newser co-founder Michael Wolff sums up the paper’s complaint in a post he published today:

It seems that the Times doesn’t want us using an itsy-bitsy T logo to identify the Times as one of our sources. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of media oranizations we link to at Newser only the Times has raised this as an issue. Given its perilous financial state, you’d think the Times should surely be spending its money on solving other problems.”

What Wolff doesn’t mention: The Times also complained about his use of one of its photos, says spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. “We asked Newser to take down a photograph that they took from NYTimes.com, without permission (and misattributed) and we have asked them not to use our gothic ‘T’ logo,” Mathis says via email. “While we appreciate Newser linking to Times articles, we need to protect the use of our trademarks, such as the gothic ‘T.’”

Wolff says the letter he received was from Deborah Beshaw, whose LinkedIn profile describes her as an administrative assistant at the Times. He wouldn’t forward me a copy, but described it as legal boilerplate warning that the Times would “pursue all available remedies, both criminal and civil” unless Newser stopped using the logo.

It’s tempting to turn this into a bigger think piece about the nature of aggregation sites, the “link-based economy” and the suit the New York Times Co. (NYT) recently settled with GateHouse Media, which accused it of violating GateHouse’s copyright when the Times Co.’s Boston.com site linked to GateHouse sites.

But if this is really just about a photo and a logo, then there’s less fire than smoke here.

Even Wolff, who understands the value of a good headline as much as anyone, admits as much, saying that he’ll stop using the Times logo–if that’s what the Times really wants. “I could care less about their logo.” he says. “I would be perfectly willing to replace it with a skull and cross bones.”

Ah, Michael Wolff! Always throwing stink bombs and making deliciously wackadoo declarations about the Internet.

This time, it’s in a dinner interview the author had with BusinessWeek’s media columnist Jon Fine recently.

Wolff (pictured here) slaps around the News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace with a series of his trash-buckling phrases, some of which are true and some a bit more of a stretch.

But he sure is entertaining!

One of Wolff’s more controversial moments:

“If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”

This is vintage Wolff, to make a big hissy-fit fuss at an opportune time.

Surprise! His latest book, a bio of media mogul Rupert Murdoch (who owns this site), titled “The Man Who Owns The News,” is coming out right about now.

And speaking of vintage, Wolff can be seen in the video below whacking away at the early Internet just over a decade ago, with me and Feed’s Steven Johnson in an appearance on the “Charlie Rose” television show.

It was the era of AOL’s dominance, with Yahoo (YHOO) as the comer and Web 1.0 in its fully overvalued glory.

“It’s craziness, it’s loco, it makes no sense,” said Wolff about the Internet, circa July 27, 1998.

His caustically funny book “Burn Rate” on his naughty early Internet adventures, wherein he was the only person not to get rich in Web 1.0, had just come out.

(And I had just come out with my book on the rise of AOL–the fall of AOL sequel came out in 2003.)

Later in the interview, Wolff could not help himself and makes a truly bad prediction: “I think the myth of the Internet is that it is going to come into everybody’s home.”

Oops, the Web is pretty much ubiquitous only 10 years later.

But Wolff does go on to make a lot of the same salient points he makes today about MySpace and the Web’s hot-today-gone-tomorrow ethos.

The video of our segment starts at the 30-minute mark.

Michael has not aged a day, but please, please excuse my shoulder pads and deeply unfortunate haircut (how did I ever get a date?):

Oh, there had to be much, much gnashing of teeth in the corporate offices of the Time Warner Center in New York yesterday with news of the sale of DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million.

Why?

Maybe because that tasty payment is going right into the hands of Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group Ventures, which bought the fashion and shopping newsletter business for $3 million in 2003.

Longtime media exec Pittman was the former star AOLer, whose nickname was Bob “Pitchman” for his smooth-as-silk selling and even more marked spinning skills.

But the Web 1.0 supernova fell quickly to earth, after the online service merged with Time Warner (TWX) in early 2001, in what is now considered one of the more significant world-class corporate disasters.

After being tossed out of AOL Time Warner in mid-2002, Pittman (pictured here), along with AOL head Steve Case, was blamed for the stock decline and other woes at the media giant by the Time Warner side, whose deep bitterness toward him has never really faded away.

Now, with Time Warner trying to make a deal to sell the AOL unit for up to $10 billion to Yahoo or Microsoft–despite it being valued at $20 billion only a few years ago–Pittman’s small but impressive score has got to grate.

“I have been associated with the start-up, turnaround or acceleration of many companies and major brands, and rarely have I seen the kind of creativity, commitment and passion I’ve seen day in and day out at DailyCandy,” said Pittman in a letter to DailyCandy staff yesterday about the sale. “And the results speak for themselves: Since we made our investment in 2003, subscriptions have grown from just over 200,000 to over 2.5 million.”

In the letter, Pittman said the company’s EBITDA was over $10 million this year on revenues of $25 million.

This is certainly different from the situation almost exactly six years ago when Pittman was driven out of the then-named AOL Time Warner on the proverbial rail.

If you want a taste of those once-grim times for Pittman, here is an excerpt from my book, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future,” which was published in 2003.

The section comes from Chapter Six, “Way, Way After the Goldrush,” as the deal imploded:

THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE NO BUSINESS

But while Time Warnerites rejoiced in their hope that the merger turmoil was finally over, the company’s troubles wouldn’t leave the front pages for a long time to come.

We’ll see if that has changed at all, after Time Warner announces its second quarter earnings later today.