Salon.com > Michael Wolff

I’m never reading the comments again

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:12:00 +0000

On Jan. 1, I made a resolution I never thought I would. I took a Sharpie and a Post-it and wrote the words "DON’T READ THE COMMENTS" in big letters and stuck it on my computer. I've been so much happier ever since.

I'm a person who believes strongly in online communication. I began my career as an online moderator back in the early '90s, and spent 14 years managing the community section of Salon, Table Talk. I've seen it all, read it all, been called it all, and made some of my closest friends via the invisible world of Internet community. And I don't ever want to read another comment again. Well, let me quantify that: I'll read them on other people's stories or YouTube channels if it's for research. And I did chime in on the comments for my story of my cancer treatment, because I felt that was a conversation I'd already been involved in for a year and a half. But otherwise, I'm done. I won't read my comments and I won't read anybody's else's unless I have to. I'm in agreement with the great Caitlin Moran, who describes the comments sections as the place where all the unhappiness in the world dwells.

Newser’s Michael Wolff meets his match

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:42:00 +0000

As the father of a 16-year-old teenage girl who regularly expresses strong feelings on the disasters bequeathed her generation by those who came before, I found nothing particularly surprising about the father-son dialogue between Tony and Daniel Judt in Sunday's New York Times. I thought the exchange lacked a certain dynamic tension, as the two seemed to agree far more than they disagreed about the debate topic at hand: President Obama's failure to move more aggressively on the issue of climate change. The distance between young Judt's disillusionment and old Judt's jaded I-never-hoped-for-much stance just wasn't far enough to generate any sparks.

For that, we have to turn to Newser's Michael Wolff, a man who appears to rise from his bed each and every morning with the same goal: What's the nastiest, ugliest, most pandering way I can generate cheap page views for my website today?

Citing zero evidence, Wolff accuses Tony Judt of faking the whole thing.

If the Web doesn’t kill journalism, Michael Wolff will

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:39:00 +0000

In the world of Web-based news aggregators, the competition for the title of lowest bottom-feeder is a ferocious sight to behold. But few would deny that Michael Wolff's Newser must be placed squarely in the middle of the conversation. A look at Newser's home page on Monday morning compels with all the sick attraction exerted by a semi jackknifing across the interstate, setting in motion a 20-car pileup.

There are two Sandra Bullock stories, "Bullock Fears Murder But Will File for Divorce," and "There's a Sex Tape ... Starring Sandra ... And It's Ultra Nasty," mixed in with your run-of-the-mill Pope sex scandal update and latest Michael Steele imbroglio. There are the required trashy slide shows, "7 Signs LiLo Is the New Britney" and "5 Other Celebs We Hated -- Temporarily" and straight-out titillation: "Maine Topless Protesters Draw Oglers."

Wolff: Murdoch probably “livid” over Post chimp cartoon

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Remember that New York Post cartoon from Wednesday, the one showing a dead chimp representing the author of the stimulus, the one that prompted debate about whether it included a racist undertone about President Obama? Well, now someone with real insight into the matter -- Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff, who recently authored a biography of Post owner Rupert Murdoch -- has weighed in.

Writing for Newser, Wolff says he does think the cartoon was racist, and deliberately so, and he also drops one interesting tidbit: Murdoch himself is probably "livid" over the decision to run it. With a hat-tip to Ben Smith, an excerpt from Wolff's post:

Sailing into the sunset

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 22:07:00 +0000

When I am at my most exhausted, and unsound, empty and overwhelmed at the same time, I make a nest on the couch in the living room, with a comforter and pillows, magazines, cat, unguents, and cool drinks. I call this "the cruise ship." It is not the same as just stretching out on the couch with a book. It is more intentional, a psychiatric Sabbath, saved for end-of-the-rope unwellness. I know I need the cruise ship when my hypochondria reaches a certain level, and I develop the symptoms of phlebitis, heart cancer, diverticulitis, or start trying to decide whether to have an elective colostomy. Exasperation is another symptom, especially toward myself, about my ineptness, wickedness, laziness or, ironically, workaholism. It does not take Anna Freud to diagnose that I'm losing it: Once when Sam was young, we were racing toward a lecture I was late for and I was spilling papers and books and coffee. And this elfin voice behind me said, "You are going too fast, and carrying too much." I've remembered this many times. To go faster and get more done is to move in the direction of death. The cruise ship carries you back toward life.

Critics pounce on New Yorker tell-all

Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The veteran reporter, critic and novelist Renata Adler has published one of seven new books pegged to the New Yorker's 75th anniversary in February. Unlike its cousins, however, Adler's New Yorker memoir, "Gone," is stirring up trouble. Last November, New York magazine reported that former New Yorker fiction editor and current New York Times Book Review editor Charles "Chip" McGrath had sent a letter of protest to Adler's publisher after reading the galleys of "Gone." Adler, McGrath said, had described him as participating in an event that never occurred.

As soon as "Gone" hit their desks, critics began sharpening their knives. New York magazine media columnist Michael Wolff weighed in this week with a tough, yet fond take on Adler and the New Yorker mystique, and in the Jan. 12 New York Times, Dinitia Smith portrays "Gone" as something of a kvetchathon. (In the Jan. 16 New York Times Magazine, reporter Arthur Lubow's profile of Adler is billed on the cover as "Renata Adler's Enemy List.")

The geeks vs. the marketroids

Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

After the inevitable dilation of pupils at the sheer scale of the America Online-Time Warner deal wore off this week, the media and the markets got down to the hard business of figuring out whether the megamerger was a Good Thing. Disagreement was rife. You could get whiplash just reading the op-ed columns of the Wall Street Journal.

First libertarian theorist Peter Huber cheered "the beginning of the end of the old mass media" and declared that this deal was "far bigger than what happened before in Gutenberg's, Marconi's and Bell's old galaxies." The "analog stragglers," Huber thundered, are "history."

Then columnist Holman Jenkins expressed doubt that the deal would even hold together -- and if it does, that it represents "the last crazy Internet valuation" and a pop to the "Internet bubble."

Then Red Herring editor Anthony Perkins applauded the merger and declared AOL boss Steve Case to be "a strategic genius with a capital G" for trading in his company's inflated stock for the more tangible assets of Time Warner.

Money for nothing

Sat, 13 Jun 1998 00:01:00 +0000

An avalanche of books bearing Michael Wolff's name landed on my desk in 1995. Wolff had created a bestseller titled "Net Guide" -- TV Guide for cyberspace! -- and was now trying to transform it into a hot franchise with titles like "Net Tech," "Net Money," "Net Sports" and so on. These volumes, cranked out at the rate of one every 20 days, breezily described places to go and things to do in the online world; much of their contents was dated before the ink had dried.

Wolff, in other words, had found a way to publish books that were even more ephemeral and disposable than Web pages. And people were buying them -- for a little while, anyway. Surveying the pile of "Net Junk" books in my mail bin, I wrote a newspaper column pointing out the futility of publishing paper guides to the Web -- a medium that excels in providing conveniently clickable catalogs of itself. And I figured that, just as soon as the Web audience got familiar enough with the new medium to understand this, Wolff's business would tank.

Self-combustion

Fri, 12 Jun 1998 23:46:00 +0000

Perhaps the most telling moment in "Burn Rate" comes a little more than halfway through the book. Michael Wolff, the aspiring Internet entrepreneur, has just succeeded in selling an essentially worthless database of information for "seven figures" to the computer magazine publishing company CMP. He and his lawyer wife, Alison, are discussing their unexpected and somewhat discombobulating coup. Wolff writes: "'Just think,' I said, warming to the moment, 'how many stupid people there are in this world who we can take advantage of.'"

In "Burn Rate," Wolff eventually runs out of stupid people willing to be his dupe. Even CMP wises up. But now, after having dumped his Internet company, Michael Wolff is back, this time in old-fashioned print media, conniving to take advantage once again. We would do well to be wary.