The company's next major project was creating one of the first guides to the Internet, albeit in book form. Its first project, Where We Stand, was a book with a companion PBS series.

In 1991, Wolff launched Michael Wolff & Company, Inc., specializing in book-packaging.

Wolff's first book was White Kids (1979), a collection of essays. Shortly afterward, he left the Times and became a contributing writer to the New Times, a bi-weekly news magazine started by Jon Larsen and George Hirsch. He published his first magazine article in the New York Times Magazine in 1974: a profile of Angela Atwood, a neighbor of his family who helped kidnap Patricia Hearst as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. While a student at Columbia, he worked for The New York Times as a copy boy. He attended Vassar College and transferred to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1975.

Wolff graduated from Montclair Academy (now Montclair Kimberley Academy) in 1971, where he was student council president in his senior year. Michael Wolff was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Lewis Allen Wolff (1920–1984), an advertising professional, and Marguerite (Vanderwerf) 'Van' Wolff (1925–2012) a reporter for Paterson Evening News. The book quickly became a New York Times number-one bestseller and became the first of a trilogy about Trump in power, the other two books being Siege (2019) and Landslide (2021). President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. On January 5, 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. Michael Wolff (born August 27, 1953) is an American journalist, as well as a columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ.

Siege michael wolff