Is Michael Wolff for real? Now he's trashing his sole competitor in the Rupert Murdoch/News Corp. book game. He tells Keith Kelly, regarding Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison, who'll take a year off from the paper for her own book: "The problem with someone from The Wall Street Journal writing a book is that they are inevitably conflicted. Either they're bitter that Murdoch bought the place or they are trying to save their job." And no one's ever conflicted at all by years of sucking-up to moguls.

The future is digital! Print will never die! Media barons proved again this week that mixing a cocktail of print and digital, old and new, hot and cool media makes a tepid and kinda gross drink. Kinda like a Chocolate martini! It was a short but complicated week, chock full of conflicting messages about atoms and bytes. Let's recap!

Last night Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn was host to a party for Napeolonic media mufti Michael Wolff and former New York mag honcho Caroline Miller's new project Newser, the web 1.0 news aggregator. Ten years ago, Michael Wolff wrote Burn Rate; it chronicled the spectacular failure of his first web venture, NetGuide. Along the way, Wolff seriously burned his backer Alan Patricof and nearly everybody else he worked with. So when if Newser fails, will there be a Burn Rate II?

Each year (or really, every 11 months and two weeks or so, kinda), the Jews observe Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, during which leather shoes and doing it are totally forbidden. Then there are many apologies. Emily did it, Balk did it, Josh did it. Choire may or may not be a Jew. Seriously, the family is still figuring it out. Weird time for the Czechs, the 1900s.

Miniature megalomaniac Michael Wolff stopped by Wall Street Journal editor at large Paul Steiger's office yesterday, presumably for "research" on his Rupert Murdoch-approved Rupert Murdoch biography. Apparently he's a very snazzy dresser.

Longtime journo and gay historian Charles Kaiser slaps hack Michael Wolff over Wolff's forthcoming hacky Rupert Murdoch bio, to be based on Wolff's hacky Murdoch profile in Vanity Fair: "Why write a love letter to the world's most amoral publisher at magazine length, when you can do the same thing at book length—and make even more money? After all, as even Wolff had the decency to acknowledge, Rupert has already put one member of the Wolff family on the News Corp. payroll." [Romenesko letters]

News aggregator Michael Wolff has signed a "high six-figure" deal to write a biography of Rupert Murdoch, who "absolutely plans to cooperate" with the mini-mogul aspirant. "I think the subject and the author were born to be put together," says Doubleday president and publisher Steve Rubin. Any further commentary would be superfluous, no? [NYP]

Would-be mogul and Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff is finally going to get on this internet thing, but right-side up this time! Could it be? He thought blogs would be long gone by now. And his talks with "gay megagorilla" Barry Diller and Barry's guy Michael Jackson fell through. But he's forging ahead! Welcome to the beta of his website... Newser! It's Matt Drudge without the fun and the brilliant curation! It's Sploid without the monkeys and paranoia! It's TMZ but completely devoid of celebrities and urgency and puns. It's Yahoo! News without the exclamation point. It's the dullest thing I've seen all day, and I've been staring into a jar of pennies for the last half hour.

Reading Michael Wolff's piece on Rudolph Giuliani in the new Vanity Fair—a portrait that paints America's Mayor as a crazed megalomaniac who delights in being an asshole and whose desperate need for attention results in his willingness to say or do anything, no matter how outlandish—leaves one with a deep and abiding certainty. Every article Michael Wolff writes about the character flaws of others is, at bottom, about Wolff himself. We're actually not sure why it took us this long to notice. Oh, and—is it us, or does Wolff just pop up with a piece once a year right around the annual magazine awards so "the important people" realize he's still alive?

• The Post has never heard of Whitewater. [NYP]
  

Oooh, Michael Wolff's got a big Judith Regan analysis in March's Vanity Fair! Let's skim: Judy's not an anti-Semite, just a crazy person . . . perversely, she's a hero in a way . . . the last over the top tabloid personality . . . has a problem with authority . . . Rupert Murdoch's gone soft . . . Jane Friedman's a diva too in her own right . . . Yawn! Frankly, we were a bit more entertained when we read these tidbits last week, in Vanessa Grigoriadis's New York profile which also tilled this increasingly barren patch of earth. But wait! Turns out, Wolff does have something new to say: while Grigoriadis only crossed paths with Regan in a job interview, Wolff's had much more personal experience of her crazitude — they were school chums. Lucky Michael was even privy to Judy's bedroom secrets — and unless you stop reading now, soon you'll share in his good fortune.

Since interest continues to percolate regarding the anonymous billionaire discussed in Michael Wolff's (no, not that Michael Wolf) Vanity Fair article, here's another round of guesses. When last discussed, we declared a toss-up between Mark Cuban and Barry Diller. Remember, the two key hints are "appropriately larger-than-life character, remarkably fit" and "he knew nothing whatsoever about the newspaper business, or news." After the jump, a few more names get dumped into the mix.

We asked for your guesses as to the identity of the mystery billionaire mentioned in Michael Wolff's Vanity Fair article, and you adroitly caught on to the resonant void of the name(s) we didn't float ourselves. The key bits of trivia were "appropriately larger-than-life character, remarkably fit" and "he knew nothing whatsoever about the newspaper business, or news. Zip. Nada." Aside from unlikelies such as Warren Buffett and Edgar Bronfman Jr., the most cogent guesses after the jump.

In Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff pokes around for reasons to explain the surge of interest among rich folk for buying media (though he ignores the copious free tail factor). The article begins and ends with Wolff enjoying an "off-the-record visit" with an anonymous billionaire who fits the bill. A few details make their way into the prose, since Wolff doesn't really want to keep the guy's name secret; where's the Media Titan cachet in that? So let's examine the billionaire tidbits:

• Dean Baquet wins the coveted Observer Media Mensch of the Year award. This follows hot on the heels of a bunch of other bullshit made-up media awards by organizations you've barely heard of, and comes a day in advance of our naming Chris Mohney's right testicle Gawker's Blog Ball of the Year. [NYO]
  

• Ed Kosner tones down criticism of Mort Zuckerman in memoir about Daily News. The actions of a man worried about his future employability or brilliant meta-commentary on how the News is essentially a softer version of the Post? We prefer to think the latter. [WWD]
• ESPN Mobile will start offering full-length college football games to the nine people who subscribe to the service. [WaPo]
• John Meacham to take reins at Newsweek from Mark Whitaker, Earth continues to revolve around the sun. [WSJ]
• "Must we really need to enumerate all the ways here in which Michael Wolff has proven himself once again to be a total asshat?" No. [NYO]

The problem with tossing off a side note about media incest is that you can never go back enough generations to reveal the original sin. Regarding the $5 million shot in the arm coming to the Huffington Post, we mentioned that one of the investors would be venture capitalist Alan Patricof, who was in on the ground floor at New York magazine several decades back. We've since been reminded that Patricof and NYM's founding editor Clay Felker shared a legendary antipathy — one that caused or at least contributed to Patricof selling out and Felker getting fired — and that their enmity was recounted by media critic Michael Wolff for the magazine's 35th anniversary. Wolff bore no love for Patricof on his own account either, as noted in his 1998 book Burn Rate. A taste, after the jump.

• Dan Rather says farewell and that he'll see us all soon. [Romenesko]
• Charlie Gibson doesn't care about ratings. Ya-huh. [WP]
• Michael Wolff doesn't like Slate because it's "by and for smart boys trying strenuously to be ever smarter than anyone they perceive as threatening their smartest status." Ironic, eh? [Slate]

Michael Wolff, recalling his failed 1996 dot-com, YPN, in the book Burn Rate. All that remain of the venture are some antiquated books and the now-redirected YPN.com.

With five days until Apple's 30th anniversary, a gaggle of news outlets are boldly writing the story we've never heard: "Apple is not like Microsoft!"