One of my favorite anecdotes regarding the oddity that is the media business appears in the early pages of Googled, Ken Auletta’s story of the early days of the media business’s uneasy collision with tech. In 2003, Mel Karmazin, then C.E.O. of a still-swaggering Viacom, visited Larry Page and Sergey Brin and learned how they’d built what was basically a perfect marketing engine that matched advertisers to users based on their expressed intent. His blunt reaction: “You’re messing with the magic.” (He didn’t say “messing,” but in the interests of optimization, I’m reluctantly censoring myself to improve email deliverability. Life is full of compromises.)