Michael Goff is a journalist and entrepreneur who has launched and built traditional and digital media properties.
Highlights: Founded Out magazine, Out.com; General Manager, Microsoft MSN; Lead Volunteer, Haiti, Clinton Aids Initiative; Partner / Owner, Towleroad; Advisory/Board Memberships
Michael’s posts are here.
Out‘s Founder Shares Tales of Its Bold Beginning for 30th Anniversary
Michael Goff currently owns and operates Towleroad, AskTell Media Group. He and Andy Towle were equal partners from 2006 until Towle’s retirement in early 2021. Together they built Towle’s personal blog into a leading gay news site. They also launched an ad network and an annual guide to Provincetown.
Goff started as an assistant and junior editor in New York while writing columns for Paper and Outweek magazines; and an active member of New York’s ACTUP. In 1992 he lined up investors and a team to launched Out magazine. The team attracted world class writers and artists working in mainstream publishing, more readers, and the full range of mainstream advertisers.
Goff went to Microsoft as editorial director of their city project, Sidewalk, and quickly sold to CitySearch. As General Manager of the MSN Internet properties he led the team moving the existing services from behind a firewall to the internet as a network leveraging traffic and launching/partnering to create new properties to fill the network’s offering. Though not part of the sales team, he negotiated and closed what was the the time the largest online advertising deal to date. ($100M+.)
Leaving Microsoft with. a few colleagues, he was Managing Partner of The Accelerator Group, which invested time and money and expertise in digital startups, 20+ companies included including pre-Google Blogger, Treehugger and others.
After the dot com bust of the early 2000s, Goff led a team assisting the government of Haiti and then the Eastern Caribbean States to create comprehensive HIV Treatment plans through the Clinton Foundation AIDS Initiative
He was a founding board member of Community Research Initiative (CRIA) and was on advisory boards from 1992 until it merged with GMHC in 2019. The organization was a pioneer, running ‘drug’ trials with communities when there was little or no financial incentive to the owner.
Also:
- Board Member, Summer of Sass a non-profit that brings young people in bad situations in the South to Provincetown for a summer to live, work, and plan the future they want.
- Former Board Member, Outfest
- Member of ACTUP New York and Queer Nation.
- Media briefing program for the 1993 March on Washington
- Editorial Excellence Award (Folio); Innovative marketing award for first gay ad on TV.
- Recognized by the New York Stonewall Foundation, and GLAAD’s “Best Gay Blog” with Andy Towle
- Created and ran first gay themed TV ad for the first LGBTQ comedy special, beating Ikea by months.
- Co-produced Day Without Art with Nan Goldin on World AIDS Day 1990.
- Produced “Out in America” (Winner Lambda Literary Award/Visual or Photo book), Viking Penguin. Annual art calendar.
- Out magazine one of “30 Hottest Magazine Launches” in the last 30 years.
- Developed early citizen-journalism effort, Bayosphere with Dan Gilmore;
- Walked the California coast between Tijuana and San Francisco (750 miles), and 500+ miles of the Camino De Santiago in Spain.
more about Michael on Goffspot.
Twitter: Follow @michael_goff
Twitter: @michael_goff
Instagram: @michael_goff
Also: @ptownhacks @tlrd @rsvptown
