Ken Cron was the guy running CMP Publications when I was Editor of NetGuide. He was also the guy running it when I left. Read into that what you want.
Somehow, according to the New York Times, he has wound up at the right hand of Barry Diller, running the media properties that Vivendi couldn’t figure out: its Universal film, television, music, theme park and game businesses. Annual sales amount to $12.5 Billion. With a B.
The paper asks, quite rightly, Who is this guy? and attempts to dig out the answer. They do get some good background, but miss the guy’s naked opportunism. This is the guy who. as Michael Wolff tells in his book Burn Rate, spent $1 million in 1993 in the apparent belief that he was buying the Internet. (What he bought was a list of AOL “Go” words and the right — which wasn’t Wolff’s to sell — to start a magazine called NetGuide.)
If you want an unbiased opinion of Ken Cron, you’re at the wrong weblog. From what I understand, Barry Diller and Ken Cron deserve each other.
(Ten points if you laughed at the headline, by the way.)
