IWantMedia runs Michael Wolff's opening address from the 2005 SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York. Since the Michael Wolff fansites have been abuzz and our inbox is flooded with thousands of requests to run an exceprt, here's a selection wherein Wolff dissects how The Wall Street Journal went from the best paper in the country to irrelevant:

And then something happened, and I've sort of tried to figure out when this was. It was certainly mid-'90s in that the Journal kind of disappeared. The Journal went out of the conversation as a point of influence other than the eccentricities of its editorial page. It seemed to if not stop existing at least stop mattering.

It was interesting because the product was as good as it had ever been. It just wasn't present in the discussion. I've spent a lot of time thinking what happened because I know a lot of people at the Journal, and it feels to me from a journalist standpoint something of a puzzle and a little bit of a tragedy. And I think that the answer is the online thing. I think the fact that the Journal felt that it was powerful enough to charge, and for a long time everyone regarded the Journal's activities online as the ultimate. They had unlocked the puzzle. In fact, I don't think they did. I think they locked themselves into a puzzle.

Hmmm. Locking yourself into a puzzle, eh? Like, say, foregoing a weekly must-read media column linked the world over for a fat gig at a monthly that's barely on the web?

He's right! It's sorta sad when you think about.

Michael Wolff: 'Free Information is Now the Topic in the Media Industry' [I Want Media]