EVER since the fall from grace in July 2002 of Jean-Marie Messier, the hubristic former boss of French media conglomerate Vivendi, and Thomas Middelhoff, ousted soon after from Germany’s Bertelsmann,…

In the old days—the days of the sidewalk shoeshine, the days of the pay phone—a New Yorker could buy an evening edition of the Times or the Post from a metal news box…