Columnist, Vanity Fair
Founder, Newser.com
Author, The Man Who Owns the News
Participant: We Media Miami ’10
Michael Wolff
Two-time National Magazine Award winner Michael Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the founder of news aggregator newser.com. His latest book is The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Rupert Murdoch, based on nine months of interviews with Murdoch and his family and associates. His work has been widely anthologized and appeared in numerous publications, including New York magazine, where he was a long-time columnist. He has also been an entrepreneur involved with the start-up of many businesses, including, in 1993, his first Internet company.
As an early Internet pioneer (an experience chronicled in his book Burn Rate), and student of the media, Wolff has witnessed and written about the revolution in news habits. The collapse of newspapers and the slow death of broadcast news have not meant the death of the news market, but rather a flight of consumers to other news platforms. News consumers want access to a wide range of news sources; they want this new wealth of information presented in an efficient and entertaining way; and they want technological tools to help them cut through the chaos of the web. Newser, launched in late 2007, is Wolff’s effort to help invent the new news.
Beth Laing is the project manager for iFOCOS, which organizes the We Media conferences, awards and community. Prior to working with We Media she worked in a variety of new media roles with Knight Ridder, Infonautics and Access Atlanta. She is currently on the board of the Atlanta Women’s Alliance (AWA), Community Advisory Board for Junior League Dekalb and a Leadership Dekalb 2010 class member.