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Michael Wolff (journalist)

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Michael Wolff
Wolff in 2009
Wolff in 2009
Born (1953-08-27) August 27, 1953 (age 70)
OccupationColumnist, Internet entrepreneur, television commentator
NationalityAmerican
Alma materVassar College
Columbia University
Notable works
Notable awardsNational Magazine Award, Mirror Award

Michael Wolff (born August 27, 1953)[1] is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ.[2] He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot.com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.

In early January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.[3] Before its release on January 5, the book and e-book both reached number one on Amazon.com and the Apple iBooks Store.[4]

Early life

Michael Wolff was born in New Jersey, the son of Lewis A. Wolff, an advertising professional, and Marguerite "Van" (Vanderwerf) Wolff (1925–2012), a newspaper reporter.[5] He went to Columbia College of Columbia University in New York City. While a student at Columbia, he worked for The New York Times as a copy boy.[citation needed]

Career

1970s

He published his first magazine article in the New York Times Magazine in 1974: a profile of Angela Atwood, a neighbor of his family. As a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, she helped kidnap Patricia Hearst. Shortly afterwards he left the Times and became a contributing writer to the New Times, a bi-weekly news magazine started by John Larsen and George Hirsch. Wolff's first book was White Kids (1979), a collection of essays.

1980s

After publishing his first book, Wolff received an advance to write a novel, which he never finished. A college friend, Steven J. Hueglin, who had become a successful Wall Street banker, asked for Wolff's help in evaluating investments in media companies. He pulled him into a career as a media business entrepreneur.[citation needed]

In 1988, Wolff took over the management of the magazine Campaigns & Elections. He became involved in advising start-up magazines, including Wired. He also raised financing for media companies and new businesses.[citation needed]

1990s

In 1991, Wolff launched Michael Wolff & Company, Inc., specializing in book-packaging. Its first project, Where We Stand, was a book with a companion PBS series. The company's next major project was creating one of the first guides to the Internet, albeit in book form. Net Guide was published by Random House.[6] On the eve of launching the title as a monthly magazine, the incipient magazine was bought by CMP Media, the publisher of computer magazines.[citation needed]

Wolff's company continued to publish a succession of book-form Internet guides. In 1995, the company took a round of venture capital investment, with shareholders including Patricof & Co., the New York venture capital firm. It began to convert its print directories into a website and digital directory called Your Personal Network. At one point, the company was valued by bankers seeking to take the company public at more than $100 million. The venture collapsed in 1997, and Wolff was expelled from the company.[citation needed]

In the fall of 1998, Wolff published a book, Burn Rate, which recounted the details of the financing, positioning, personalities, and ultimate breakdown of Wolff's start-up Internet company, Wolff New Media. The book became a bestseller. In its review of Wolff's book Burn Rate, Brill's Content criticized Wolff for "apparent factual errors" and said that 13 people, including subjects he mentioned, complained that Wolff had "invented or changed quotes".[7]

In August 1998, Wolff was recruited by New York magazine to write a weekly column. Over the next six years, he wrote more than 300 columns.[8] The entrepreneur Steven Brill, the media banker Steven Rattner, and the book publisher Judith Regan, were criticized by him.[9][10][11]

2000s

Wolff at the Monaco Media Forum, 2008

Wolff was nominated for the National Magazine Award three times, winning twice.[12] His second National Magazine Award was for a series of columns he wrote from the media center in the Persian Gulf as the Iraq War started in 2003. His book, Autumn of the Moguls (2004),[13] which predicted the mainstream media crisis that hit later in the decade, was based on many of his New York magazine columns.

In 2004, when New York magazine's owners, Primedia, Inc., put the magazine up for sale, Wolff helped assemble a group of investors, including New York Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, to back him in acquiring the magazine.[14][15] Although the group believed it had made a successful bid, Primedia decided to sell the magazine to the investment banker Bruce Wasserstein.[16]

In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that Wolff was "uninterested in the working press," preferring to focus on "the power players—the moguls" and was "fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money." She also noted that "the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events." Calling his writing "a whirlwind of flourishes and tangents and asides that often stray so far from the central point that you begin to wonder whether there is a central point."[17]

In 2005, Wolff joined Vanity Fair as its media columnist.[18][19] In 2007, with Patrick Spain, the founder of Hoover's, and Caroline Miller, the former editor-in-chief of New York magazine, he launched Newser, a news aggregator website.[20]

That year, he also wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, based on more than 50 hours of conversation with Murdoch, and extensive access to his business associates and his family. The book was published in 2008.[21][22] That year he also began writing a daily column for Newser.[citation needed] Beginning in mid-2008, Wolff briefly worked as a weekly columnist for The Industry Standard, an Internet trade magazine published by IDG.[23]

2010s

Wolff received a 2010 Mirror Award in the category Best Commentary: Traditional Media for his work in Vanity Fair.[24]

The Columbia Journalism Review criticized Wolff in 2010 for suggesting that The New York Times was aggressively covering the breaking News International phone hacking scandal as a way of attacking News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch.[relevant?][25]

In 2010, Wolff became editor of the advertising trade publication Adweek. He was asked to step down one year later, amid a disagreement as to "what this magazine should be".[26]

In early January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published. Quotes released pre-publication included unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.[3] News of the book's imminent publication and its embarrassing depiction of Trump prompted Trump's lawyer to issue on January 4, 2018 a cease and desist letter and to threaten libel lawsuits against Wolff, his publisher Henry Holt and Company, and Bannon, an action that actually stimulated pre-launch book sales.[27] According to legal experts and historians, threats of litigation by Trump as a sitting president against a book author and publisher were unprecedented, and challenged the freedom of speech protected by the U.S. First Amendment.[28] Before its release on January 5, the book and e-book reached number one both on Amazon.com and the Apple iBooks Store.[4]

Books

  • White Kids. Simon & Schuster. 1979. ISBN 978-0-671-40001-9.
  • Where We Stand: Can America Make It in the Global Race for Wealth, Health, and Happiness?. Bantam Books. 1992. ISBN 978-0-553-08119-0.
  • Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet. Simon & Schuster. 1998. ISBN 978-0-684-85621-6.
  • Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Collins. 2003. ISBN 978-0-06-662113-5.
  • The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. Broadway Books. 2008. ISBN 978-0-385-52612-8.
  • Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media In the Digital Age. Portfolio. 2015. ISBN 978-1-59184-813-4.
  • Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Henry Holt and Company. January 5, 2018. ISBN 978-1-250-15806-2.

References

  1. ^ "Wolff, Michael, 1953–". id.loc.gov. Retrieved January 5, 2018.
  2. ^ "Michael Wolff", search page, GQ magazine
  3. ^ a b Hartmann, Margaret (January 4, 2018). "Trump Tries to Stop Publication of Wolff Book, Hits Bannon With Cease-and-Desist". Daily Intelligencer. Retrieved January 5, 2018. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  4. ^ a b Stelter, Brian (January 4, 2018). "Michael Wolff's Trump book hits #1 on Amazon, publisher speeds up rollout plan". CNNMoney.
  5. ^ "Marguerite Wolff Obituary". The Record/Herald News. September 20, 2012.
  6. ^ ASIN 0440223903
  7. ^ "The Truth About Burn Rate". October 1998. Archived from the original on July 18, 2012.
  8. ^ Michael Wolff Archive – New York Magazine. Nymag.com. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  9. ^ Neyfakh, Leon (December 15, 2008). "Michael Wolff Wonders: Why's Judith Regan After the Spotlight Again?". The New York Observer. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  10. ^ Koblin, John (October 26, 2008). "Cold Case File: The Missing Daily News Steve Rattner Maureen White Story". The New York Observer. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  11. ^ Kurtz, Howard (May 30, 2001). "New York's Media Hound; Columnist Michael Wolff Stalks the Pack and Goes for the Throat". The Washington Post.
  12. ^ National Magazine Awards. Cursor.org. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  13. ^ Wolff, Michael (September 16, 2004). "Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media". Harper Business. ISBN 978-0-06-662110-4. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  14. ^ Yglesias, Matthew. (October 23, 2003) "Who needs New York magazine?", Slate Magazine, Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  15. ^ Carr, David (December 15, 2003). "Bid for New York Magazine: A Dance of Money and Ego". The New York Times. Retrieved May 12, 2010.
  16. ^ "Michael Wolff, On His Own (But Not Really)", Media Features – Media]. Women's Wear Daily (WWD), July 2, 2009). Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  17. ^ Cottle, Michelle (August 29, 2004). "Wolff Trapped". The New Republic.
  18. ^ Wolff, Michael (November 20009). "Big Bad Wolff". Vanity Fair. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  19. ^ Wolff, Michael (October 15, 2009). "Big Bad Wolff". The Hive | Vanity Fair.
  20. ^ "Can Michael Wolff's Newser colonize the news frontier?". Los Angeles Times blog. Archived from the original on May 9, 2009. Retrieved May 12, 2010. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  21. ^ Carr, David (December 28, 2008). "Plowing Through the Door". The New York Times. Retrieved May 12, 2010.
  22. ^ ASIN 0385526121
  23. ^ "The Industry Standard Announces Powerful Editorial Line-Up; Renowned Author Michael Wolff And Web Pioneer Carl Steadman To Pen Weekly Columns For IDG Weekly". Mmit.stc.sh.cn (April 15, 1998). Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  24. ^ Alvarez, Alex (June 10, 2010). "The Mirror Awards: A Reflection On Media's Most Meta Awards Ceremony". Adweek.
  25. ^ "Michael Wolff's High Cynicism". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved January 4, 2018.
  26. ^ Peters, Jeremy W. (October 17, 2011). "Michael Wolff Steps Down as Editor of Adweek". New York Times.
  27. ^ Canfield, Michael (January 4, 2018). "Michael Wolff Trump book defies cease and desist order, bumps up release to Friday". Entertainment. Retrieved January 5, 2018.
  28. ^ Parker, Ashley (January 4, 2018). "Trump's effort to stop publication of scathing book is a break in precedent". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 5, 2018.

External links

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