If there's one thing that Michael Wolff is sure of, it's that people shouldn't listen to him. And that's a good thing, considering that his track record for accuracy is not exactly stellar.
The Newser.com founder and Vanity Fair columnist's predictions on the demise of newspapers may have yet to come to fruition, but that's not going to stop him from reiterating the failures of "Old Media" like the New York Times and "New Media" like, well, Newser.com.
Speaking at Barry Diller's IAC headquarters today, Wolff began by telling the audience that he hates the "relentlessly literal" nature of the Internet, which is especially a problem when you are prone to hyperbole and large declarations, as Wolff is want.
He continued by saying that "you shouldn’t take seriously what you hear from me."
Those opening comments at the Advertising 2.0 conference may have been aimed at his conference host and Diller's employee Tina Brown, considering that just a few months ago he was calling the IAC funded Daily Beast "preposterous" and Brown an "old magazine hack." Meanwhile, yesterday Diller spoke in the same space, saying that audiences better get prepared to pay for media content.
But Wolff doesn't think that old media will succeed in finding a successful paid model. Talking to Bloomberg News CEO Andrew Lack, Wolff said that newspapers will disappear: "And we won’t know the difference."
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by Meghan Keane
11 June 2009 22:37pm
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