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Good morning,
Thanks for reading The Backstory, our weekly digest of the best new work at Puck. I hope that you and your family had a great holiday.
It was another fantastic week: Lauren Sherman offered the readout from the Bezos-Sánchez fashion bunker; Dylan Byers had the backstory on Jeff Zucker’s new bidding war; Bill Cohan provided a David Zaslav wellness check; Matt Belloni corrected the great box office fallacy; Julia Alexander examined the holiday movie economy; Jonathan Handel assessed the actors’ A.I. fears; and Teddy Schleifer captured Silicon Valley’s whisper campaign about Sam Altman. Meanwhile, Baratunde Thurston chatted with Barack Obama, Peter Hamby took the under on Haley, Tina Nguyen presaged the Mike Johnson show, and Abby Livingston documented a pitiful week on Capitol Hill.
Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.
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| For Thanksgiving, my family and I decamped to southern Vermont, where we’ve vacationed a couple times a year since our kids were little. My wife, Rebecca, grew up spending winter weekends skiing in the Green Mountains, and I’d enjoyed a lot of time as a kid in the nearby Berkshires. New England is its New England-iest this time of year, when you almost don’t mind the specter of the sun setting at 4:45, or the bone-rattling chills that greet you in the morning.
One of the features of traveling to the same spot with some regularity over the years is the unexpected memories that pop up along the way—those subtle milestones of your life that you don’t appreciate until they’ve passed you by. Driving up through Albany, past all that depressing brutalist architecture, and due east towards Bennington, I zipped by the Starbucks where I’d once pulled over to sign off the final documents for Puck’s Series A investment—the moment when this dream, as the poet Delmore Schwartz once noted, truly gave birth to the responsibility of our mission.
As we headed for our holiday luncheon at the beautiful old Equinox hotel, in Manchester, I recalled a younger version of myself—much younger, by the way, pre-grays and wrinkles and rounded edges—standing on that verdant lawn posing for a picture with my eldest son, my mind aimlessly adrift, imagining a new kind of media company focused on reinstalling creators at the center of the economic equation. Sitting down for hot chocolate with my family one morning at a local cafe, I remembered marooning there years before when Matt Belloni and I were on the phone dealing with some ornery publicists over an item in What I’m Hearing. I smiled and laughed to myself, recalling all too well that we weren’t laughing back then.
Of course, I don’t need a holiday to be grateful for my indefatigable partners and our loyal community. That’s a daily ritual, and one we take seriously at Puck. But the distance from New York, and the work emanating from our company’s generationally talented team, crystalized some of the more latent truths of our industry this week. In particular, we are endeavoring from one set of platforms and business models to the next frontier, assessing (and re-assessing) value all along the way, learning from each other in real time—and learning, perhaps reassuringly, that the future doesn’t always necessarily look as different as we once imagined.
It can be an adventure, to be sure. In A Zaz Wellness Check, the always insightful William D. Cohan explains the humbling challenges befalling David Zaslav, one of Puck’s favorite protagonists, as he reins in his WBD frankencompany. After providing some necessary P&L Ozempic during the past year, WBD’s downward EBITDA guidance has led some to question the company’s cut-to-grow thesis. At the very least, others are recognizing that Zaz may possess some truly unique talents as a C.E.O., but no one has all the answers in the post-ZIRP economy.
In A Quick Fix for (Some of) the Actors’ A.I. Contract Fears, Puck contributor Jonathan Handel wonders aloud how quickly and transformatively artificial intelligence will remake the movie business. (Indeed, everything about A.I. is dramatic, as Teddy Schleifer notes in Altman Alternative Facts.) Furthermore, Matt highlights the dialectic at play in the entertainment industry, which can no longer adequately explain even what constitutes a flop any longer. Apple, Marvel, and the Great Box Office Fallacy lays it all out elegantly.
And yet in Lord Zucker & The Great Telegraph Chase, Dylan Byers brilliantly documents the complexities of Jeff Zucker’s bid for The Telegraph and The Spectator, the collective vade mecum of the Tory elite, in a $1.4 billion debt-to-equity deal. Amid a time of profound pessimism and general confusion in the news media, it’s reassuring to see the value placed on a pair of heritage assets and the promise envisioned by some of the world’s savviest investors. (Outside of Zucker’s RedBird fund, Murdoch and Lord Rothermere also planned bids for the Telegraph and Spectator. Will Lewis, the incoming C.E.O. of The Washington Post, was also working on a bid before Bezos hired him.)
Driving home, passing Black Friday shoppers and thruway rubberneckers, it wasn’t lost on me that we’re at an inflection point in the industry, and my colleagues and I are thankful and excited to live through it. It’s the story of our lifetime, precisely what you should expect from your Puck membership.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
