Michael Wolff

We've heard quite a bit about Michael Wolff's feuds this week—including one with Conrad Black too!—but in case you haven't had enough, here's one more:

In today's edition of The Observer, we mention an anecdote we reported first last week: Michael Wolff invited 50 people from News Corporation to the party for his biography of Rupert Murdoch, and he said that none of them responded to the invite except for Col Allan. Mr. Wolff told us that Mr. Allan told him to lose his email address and never write again.

We ran the anecdote by Mr. Allan yesterday, and he wrote to us: "i have not received an email from mr wolff or replied to one." (Punctuation Mr. Allan's.)  read more »

Earlier this morning, Media Mob spoke to Newser.com founder Michael Wolff, whose recently published Rupert Murdoch biography took a beating today at the hands of an angry Judith Regan in the New York Daily News. Mr. Wolff wondered aloud why after more than a year of refusing to talk to press, Ms. Regan had chosen this moment to "get back in the game." He speculated that Ms. Regan's sudden willingness to go on the record has something to do with the $10.75 million dollar settlement she received as a result of the spectacular defamation suit she filed in November of 2007 against News Corporation.  read more »

Michael Wolff is scratching his head over why after more than a year of staying almost entirely off the record, his old pal Judith Regan—whom he's known since their undergraduate days at Vassar when she was a "pretty, plumpish hippie"—is trying to get all this attention suddenly by telling the New York Daily News she's going to destroy him for the way he portrayed her in his recent biography of her old boss Rupert Murdoch.

"I guess she wants in," Mr. Wolff said in an interview just now. He speculated that Ms. Regan was emboldened to return to public life because she has received her $10.75 million dollar settlement from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, whom she sued last November for wrongful termination and defamation.

"She got her settlement, she has this money," Mr. Wolff said. "I'm sure she was keeping quiet because she didn't want to rock the boat on that. Now she's got money in hand, and she's gotta get back in the game."  read more »

Volatile publisher Judith Regan on Michael Wolff and his portrayal of her in his recent The Man Who Owns the News: "He's grossly irresponsible. I'm going to sue him personally, so he'll have to spend his own money. He projects his own perverted view of the world on everyone else. He is consumed with hatred, vitriol and pathological envy." [R&M]

Mort Zuckerman and charities run by Steven Spielberg and Elie Wiesel were among those ripped off by crooked investor Bernard Madoff. [NY Post]

During her split from John Mayer, reps for Jennifer Aniston were "scouting candidates" to play her boyfriend on the promotional tour for Marley & Me.  read more »

Michael Wolff invited fifty people from News Corp to his book party last night celebrating his biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, at Milk Studios in West Chelsea, but none of them showed.

"None of them RSVP'd, none of them said yes or no," he said last night, while speaking to a reporter, Gabriel Snyder from Gawker, Gawker czar Nick Denton and David Carey, the group president of Condé Nast.

We couldn't even find News Corp spokesman Gary Ginsberg!

Well, truth be told, one person did reply to his invite: New York Post editor Col Allan who told Mr. Wolff to lose his e-mail address and never to write again.

We'll take that as a 'no.'

Much was made of how Mr. Wolff's party had to be rescheduled for Tuesday night instead of Monday so it wouldn't conflict with Wendi Murdoch's blowout birthday party at the Gramercy hotel on Monday.

Invites were sent out a few weeks ago saying the party was scheduled for Monday, before a new email said it would be Tuesday.

Everyone figured, Okay, scheduling conflict!

So we got excited we'd see the Murdochs. But we were confused when we couldn't find the Murdochs.

Mr. Wolff said that was all a big misunderstanding.

"We just made a mistake," he said. "It really wasn't for the eighth [Monday], but it was was always for ninth [Tuesday], and then someone came along said, 'Oh! That must have come that because...'"

"Look, the truth is we had no idea," he continued.

In any event, he said the door was open for Mr. Murdoch.

"We're waiting," said Mr. Wolff.  read more »

Ah, now that Michael Wolff has released his new biography on Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, it was just about time for him to babble some highly quotable comment and drum up some press for it: like, say, "MySpace users are [expletive] cretins."

His friend, Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, took the author out to dinner and discussed a subject he doesn't go into depth in his new book: MySpace.

Apparently, Mr. Murdoch and pals aren't too happy with it.

MW: ...I think it is--if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor.

 read more »

While we had him on the phone talking about Rupert Murdoch, we thought we'd ask Michael Wolff what he thought of The Daily Beast, the new Web site from Tina Brown that is in plain competition with Newser.com, the news aggregator site that Mr. Wolff started last year.

Mr. Wolff first shared his thoughts on The Daily Beast back in April, when he told Gawker that he didn't expect much out of Ms. Brown because last he'd heard she didn't know how to check her email.

He was no gentler today.

"I think it's preposterous," Mr. Wolff said.  read more »

Rupert Murdoch trusted Michael Wolff to write a nice book about him, but then Mr. Wolff went and wrote all about how Mr. Murdoch ridicules Fox News and is embarrassed of Roger Ailes. Mr. Murdoch got a copy of Mr. Wolff's book, The Man Who Owns The News—which comes out in six weeks—through a well-placed pal in Europe, and now he's gone public in the pages of The New York Times with his objections.

Tim Arango, who reported the story, suggests that maybe Mr. Murdoch is just stomping his feet over this because he wants the people he accidentally insulted to take whatever Mr. Wolff has in his book that might hurt their feelings with a dose of skepticism.  read more »

How do rumors get started? They get started, apparently, by journalists who seek to connect with powerful sources, according to Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff, who shares an excerpt from his upcoming Rupert Murdoch biography in the October issue of the magazine.

In Tuesdays with Rupert, Mr. Wolff writes:

[Mr. Murdoch] may be among the biggest gossips in New York. In the months of interviewing him, I found that the most reliable way to hold his interest was to bring him a rich nugget. His entire demeanor would change. He’d instantly light up. He’d go from distracted to absolutely focused. Gossip gives him life (and business opportunities).  read more »

The New York Post's Keith Kelly reported yesterday that Michael Wolff’s book on Rupert Murdoch and the Dow Jones takeover is coming out in December, instead of February as initially intended. This spurred Media Mob to get in touch with Mr. Wolff and find out why. We did, pretty much right away, and the answer was just “Christmas,” so we stayed on the line for another few minutes and asked Mr. Wolff some more things.

Below, the conversation is reproduced, though be warned that while none of Mr. Wolff’s words were changed or rearranged, the questions in bold have been reconstructed from memory.  read more »

Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff, who is writing an authorized biography of Rupert Murdoch due out next fall, takes a shot in today's New York Post at the Wall Street Journal's media reporter Sarah Ellison, who recently announced plans to write a book about the transformation of the news media, using Mr. Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones as its centerpiece.

Mr. Wolff told the Post's Keith Kelly that Ms. Ellison has no business writing a book about the Murdoch takeover in light of her affiliation with the company that's being taken over.

"The problem with someone from The Wall Street Journal writing a book is that they are inevitably conflicted," Wolff is quoted as saying. "Either they're bitter that Murdoch bought the place or they are trying to save their job."

It's unclear whether Mr. Wolff is suggesting that Ms. Ellison's coverage of the Dow Jones-News Corp. deal--her beat at The Journal since this past summer--is similarly tainted by conflict of interest.

UPDATE: In an e-mail to the Media Mob, Ms. Ellison said, "I'll let my book speak for itself."

Yesterday evening, journalists and newsy iconoclasts alike gathered at Graydon Carter's uber-trendy, West Village bistro, the Waverly Inn, to celebrate the launch of Newser.com, Michael Wolff's latest project, an innovative online news service that claims to "do the reading for you."

The site, which has been available in beta form since August but launched yesterday with all the bells and whistles, uses high-tech machines to scour the web for news. Human beings, in the form of editors and writers, then comb through these stories to find the ones to highlight. Once top-tier stories are selected, they are fused and re-formatted to be presented in a "smart and entertaining" way. Drudge-like, the site runs the gamut from Turkey's political crisis to Oprah's school girl scandals. One cutesy, and possibly brilliant, feature: an adjustable filter tool, which can be set anywhere between opposite spectrums of "Soft" and "Hard" news, so that readers control whether they get entertainment or more serious journalism.

   read more »

Newser.com, the online news aggregator that web entrepreneur/journalist Michael Wolff started last summer in an "attempt to rescue a common narrative of public life," is in the process of a redesign. A Newser insider gave us a sneak peek at the new front page, which is expected to go live in the next few days.

Truth is, if the basic conceit of Newser—that people need gatekeepers to protect them from freedom, by scanning the web and telling them which articles to read—weren't so aggressively anti-future and anti-Internet, we'd be tempted to say the new design is kind of innovative. This is mostly because of a new sliding bar that lets you decide how much "soft news" and how much "hard news" you want presented to you on the page. All the way to the left means lots of roadside bombings in Iraq and wildfires in California; all the way to the right means gay Dumbledore and Snoop Dogg's tax problems.  read more »

When Michael Wolff started shopping his biography of Rupert Murdoch, he opted to go with a "high six-figure" offer from Doubleday instead of taking the risk of having his previous publisher, Harper Collins, put out the book. (Mr. Murdoch's News Corp. owns Harper Collins.)

But these days Mr. Wolff has emerged as something of a sympathizer—at least with Mr. Murdoch's ambition to own The Wall Street Journal.

In The Times:  read more »