Michael Wolff (born August 27, 1953) is an American author, essayist, and journalist. He currently writes a regular column for Vanity Fair magazine. He is well known for his acerbic, combative, and humorous style. His most recent book, The Man Who Owns the News, is a biography of Rupert Murdoch, based on more than 50 hours of interviews with the media mogul.
Michael Wolff was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Lewis A. Wolff, an advertising man, and Marguerite V. Wolff, a newspaper reporter. He went to Vassar College and then transferred 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. He published his first magazine article in the New York Times Magazine in 1974, a profile of Angela Atwood, a neighbor while he was growing up, who, as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, kidnapped Patricia Hearst. Shortly after this, he left the Times and became a contributing writer to the magazine New Times, a bi-weekly news magazine started by John Larsen and George Hirsch. Wolff's first book, White Kids, a collection of essays, was published in 1979.
After publishing his first book, Wolff received an advance to write a novel. He was beset with a writer's block that lasted for more than five years, at which point he gave up writing. 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, pushing him into a career as a media business entrepreneur. In 1988, Wolff took over the management of Washington, D.C.-based magazine Campaigns & Elections. He became involved in advising start-up magazines, including Wired, and raising money for media companies and new businesses. In 1991, he launched Michael Wolff & Company, Inc. The company specialized 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. On the eve of launching the title as a monthly magazine, the incipient magazine was bought by CMP Media, the New York-based publisher of computer magazines. Wolff's company continued to published 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, and 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.
Without prospects, Wolff returned to writing, from which he had been absent for more than ten years, and recounted all the details of the financing, positioning, personalities, and ultimate breakdown of a start-up Internet company. The book, Burn Rate, became a bestseller and is still thought by many to be the finest book about the dot com period.Wolff briefly became a weekly columnist for The Industry Standard, an Internet trade magazine published by IDG. Shortly thereafter, in August 1998, he was recruited by New York magazine to write a weekly column. Over the next six years he wrote more than 300 columns, solidifying his reputation as provocative and knowledgeable writer about the media industry. During this time, Wolff, writing with a style that combined humor, business acumen, and trenchant social analysis, became a bête noire to many powerful figures in the media industry. The entrepreneur Steven Brill, the media banker Steven Rattner, and the book publisher Judith Regan, were among the figures who came to bear Wolff a special enmity.Wolff has been nominated for the National Magazine Award three times, winning twice. 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, published in 2004, that predicted the mainstream media crisis that would 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 title up for sale, Wolff helped assemble a group of investors, including New York Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, to back him in an acquisition of the magazine. Although the group believed it had made a successful bid, Primedia decided to sell the magazine to the investment banker Bruce Wasserstein.
In 2005, Wolff joined Vanity Fair as its media columnist. 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. 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. That year he also began writing a daily column for Newser.
