The death of the media mogul

[Commentary] Reinhard Mohn, the man who turned Bertelsmann from a printer of Protestant bibles in a small town in Germany to a global media company that employs 106,000 people, died on Saturday at the age of 88. His life has encouraging and discouraging lessons for media companies as they confront the upheaval of recording, print and broadcasting industries caused by the Internet. A true entrepreneur can seize upon social and technological changes to revolt against traditional ways of doing business and forge new ones. But the Internet presents a different type of challenge to those Mohn confronted. The challenge of the Internet is that it blows up the control of distribution, ensuring that all content owners compete on equal terms. Moguls can no longer exploit its scarcity by buying television spectrum or by owning printing presses. That is why media moguls have been pushed on to the defensive by a new breed of technology moguls such as Steve Jobs of Apple and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google. Control of distribution has passed to people who make the software through which content passes.