Every year, top media executives gather at the secretive Allen & Co. “summer camp” for the media world, to which the press is not invited.
So, here are some details of this year’s meeting.
This is the 27th Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
The organizer is Herb Allen III, president of the 170-person New York-based investment bank.
The conference brings in about 1,000 people including participants and their families.
A third of the invitees this year are attending the conference for the first time.
The conference and Allen & Co. itself don’t even have a Web site.
Popular activities for guests include golf and hiking, and water fights on the river.
It’s a four-day off-the-record conference.
The usual suspects list includes Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams are new faces in the meeting.
Another first-time Internet attendee is Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, the former chairman of MySpace.
Also attending are: New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
The first leaks:
Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger said that “People are going to pay for content. We are not worried about that.”
Despite the hype about Twitter, IAC Chairman Barry Diller was pessimistic about Twitter’s prospects for making money.
But former AOL executive Ted Leonsis chimed in that media executives who are hoping to to force consumers to pay for content are likely to be “disappointed.”
Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, in the audience, didn’t speak up to defend his property.
News Corp is not interested in buying Twitter and will not sell its struggling social network MySpace, said the media conglomerate’s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch.
Warren Buffett privately told Liberty Media Chairman John Malone that he would pay $5 a month for Facebook (other sources say YouTube).
“No one had any answers” about making money on the Internet, said Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who is in the meeting.
More leaks in the next posts.
Picture by Reuters.