Newser.com, the aggregation site run by Most Important Man In The Media Michael Wolff, has seen its traffic fall by about two thirds since May. This is directly attributable to Michael Wolff being annoying.


Rupert Murdoch's paycheck this year plunged 40%, to $18 million. His wrinkles held steady, at a skillion. Tangentially related: News Corp is folding its free London commuter paper.

The latest on the Tribune "saga," of Sam Zell slowly being shown the door, and told to walk the fuck through it:

Tribune Co. said its ownership is likely to change as the newspaper-and-television company emerges from bankruptcy-court protection, a shift that people familiar with the matter say would likely put the company in the hands of its lenders and shrink primary debt by more than 90%.

Lefty magazine The Progressive, needs to raise $90,000 in the next two weeks or it will fold. Now you cannot cry ignorance.

Well, Michael, maybe you like Silvio Berlusconi because, as you point out, he spends his time frolicking with topless women half his age and getting a divorce? Is there anything going on in your life that could cause you to relate to that?

No, the reason Wolff likes Berlusconi is that he lives a life without consequences:

He's been indicted a vast number of times, always escaping through some form of banana republic or slapstick jurisprudence, and doing it with almost no pretense that he's not doing it. Getting away with it has become part of his charm. [Emphasis ours.]

Speaking of consequences: When we got an e-mail last night with a link to Wolff's new column in the July issue of Vanity Fair, we were excited—for once!—to read it. We'd been awaiting what we'd heard would be a lengthy confessional examination of Wolff's affair with a 28-year-old Vanity Fair intern named Victoria Floethe, the subsequent dissolution of his marriage, and the gossip machinery that kicked into gear to publicize the mess. We knew it was coming because Wolff had come by the office to interview our boss Nick Denton for the story—way back in March. It sounded like a nifty idea.

But sadly no. Wolff instead has chosen to write about the Obama press shop, which he finds "brilliant and successful and certainly calculated." But it has a sinister side: With the mainstream newspapers dying before their eyes and the upstart—and partisan—digital media hungry for any old handout, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and his co-horts are "in greater control of the media than any administration before them." That does sound bad, but we wonder if Wolff's column might have come out a little sunnier had he not been forced to write this humbling paragraph:

Even though I've been invited to the White House for a talk with Gibbs, there's an abrupt cancellation when, after some chitchat with Burton, it becomes clear that my interest is in process rather than, per se, message. And then a kind of sudden vaporization-no Gibbs, according to Marissa Hopkins, his assistant, "for the foreseeable future."

That's right—the savvy bastards were on to him. What sort of manipulative power-mongers are these, who don't want to talk about process and insist on substance?

We e-mailed Wolff to ask him when the good-sounding column will come out. He replied, "Right now, Obama administration [sic] seems more pressing than my personal life—an evergreen if there ever was one." That sounded to us like it got killed. But no, he says: "Yet to be written. Will keep you posted." Please do, Michael.

The old pattern of a cute ingénue charming the pants off an aging media tycoon seemed like a dying trope. Think Anna Wintour and Si Newhouse at Condé Nast (okay, there was no evidence they actually slept together). Or Tina Brown and Auberon Waugh of Private Eye back in the U.K. (they pretty definitely did).

And along comes Floethe to revive it! Cityfile reports (and we've also heard) that Floethe and Wolff have been carrying on an affair since she was an intern at Vanity Fair, where Wolff is a contributing writer. Floethe denies it. But the whiff of scandal at an Internet news site is energizing. Online editors, by and large, have not yet grown rich and powerful enough to command the attentions of the young, ambitious, and unscrupulous. Who is this Floethe, and what makes her such a likely target of rumors of an affair?

A self-described "femme fatale." Floethe infuriated Slate readers last year by describing a 2006 trip to the Caucasian nation of Georgia, where she and her boyfriend, whom she describes only as a "travel writer," hobnobbed with President Mikheil "Misha" Saakashvili. She unabashedly stripped down to her swimwear for Sakaashvili:

The next day, Misha, accompanied by eight CIA-trained bodyguards, flew us in a vintage Soviet chopper to what looked like a Bond villain's compound on the beach. After I changed into my femme fatale bikini, an armed guard escorted me from the dacha to the beach, where Misha was riding a jet ski. I hesitated just a moment before I clung to the president for dear life (only briefly wondering whether the travel writer had traded me for access to high places).

Likes older men. Floethe insists that she and Wolff are "great friends." She certainly has a lot of great friends. The "travel writer" boyfriend whom she never names in the Slate piece is Melik Kaylan, a widely published journalist much older than her. At the time Floethe and he were going out, Kaylan was married. He helped introduce her to Wolff, who got her an internship at Vanity Fair. According to our tipster, to Kaylan's dismay, Floethe switched her affections from Kaylan to Wolff. She's also dated Lawrence Osborne, the travel writer ex of founding Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers. And at an Interview party, she was photographed clinging to the side of English writer Adrian Dannatt (left).

Raised by a Palin voter. Floethe wrote in the Guardian before the election of her upbringing by a Republican mother:

My mother is a Republican-committee-woman type who recently moved from Buckhead in Atlanta to a gated community called Big Canoe an hour from the city in the north Georgia mountains. If she had political opinions beyond some traditional Republican bromides as well as the irksome articles and emails she forwards, I'd long ago become inured to them. To me it was just mom-ish background noise. Whatever my mother's politics, we comported ourselves like any more or less liberal (certainly for the south we were liberal), upwardly mobile family - an emphasis on culture betterment, Ivy League schools and, ultimately, an apartment for me in the East Village in Manhattan.

An ex-trust funder. In Slate two weeks ago, Floethe confessed that her trust fund was not what it once was:

My small but helpful trust fund lost 40 percent all at once, and then another 20 percent, leaving me, practically speaking, destitute. I suddenly needed something more than an Internet writing job (Internet writers need trust funds) at the exact moment when there were no jobs. Either that or a man of means.

Part of the beauty of a trust fund has been the freedom to avoid such a man, those incredibly rich but invariably dull hedge funders and private equity guys, bean counters and bureaucrats, so available in New York and urged on all single girls.

What, no mention of aging Internet entrepreneurs as an option?

(Photos via Cityfile and Guest of a Guest)

I'm gonna go ahead and say friend, if only because his going rogue at Fox and deciding to mostly just report the news objectively (albeit while yelling) is a noble (if pointless) effort to steer the cable news net back toward the gummy middle. Plus he's fiery and angry enough while defending his supposed non-bias that he's still got a streak of the occasionally-fun Fox crazy running through him:

"But we are under intense scrutiny because of our opinion shows. Are there people who want the news done a certain way? You bet there are, and some are in this building. But they don't affect what I do. The inner pressure and outer pressure that everyone thinks exists doesn't. When I hear people say that Fox News is right wing, I know that's not true, because I'm the one doing the news. It's my show, and there's no place for opinion on my show. It's uninteresting to me. I don't care what Sean Hannity thinks and I don't care what Alan Colmes thinks and I guarantee they don't care what I think and they don't know, either. You know what's interesting to me? What's interesting to me is that the thing people want to know about is the part on which I spend absolutely no time."

Because They Hate Shepard Smith and They Want Him to Fail [Esquire]

Michael Wolff was talking to lefty media blogger Rory O'Connor at the bar.

We asked him if he'd been asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement for Newser.

He laughed. "Never! No NDAs, never," he said. "That's the rule of the road."

So there might very well be a tell-all in his future. Rory laughed and said, "It's inevitable!"

Wolff agreed: "Inevitable."

"It could be called, "I can't believe those idiots gave me money to do it all again!" Rory said.

We asked Wolff about the algorithm that is Newser's kind of main claim to fame. Users can move an indicator on a continuum that runs from hard to soft news. "I have no idea how it works," Wolff said. "The tech guys explained it to me but I zoned out halfway through. Go ask that guy," he said pointing into a web of white-haired bespectacled men. "The one with white hair and the glasses."

Later, Caroline Miller was lingering by the door, ready to escape. Man, why didn't she get an NDA out of Wolff? "Because I'm feckless!" she said. Nice.

"Michael doesn't even have a contract," she said. "This whole thing is all on a handshake."

So what exactly does Wolff do for Newser? Here's what he does not do: "He's not allowed to talk to anyone on the inside," Miller said. "He's not allowed to manage anybody. What he discovered a long time ago about himself is that he likes to fire people. He has the ideas but I make them happen."

So he has ideas. And did he bring the money? No. "It's all Pat's money anyway!" That would be Patrick Spain, the CEO of HighBeam and soon to be the main character of a really harsh book about how the internet sucks.