Good morning,

It’s Jon Kelly, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Puck, our new media company focused on the nexus of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. I say this all the time, and I really mean it: on behalf of our amazing team of journalists, we truly appreciate your ongoing support. We hope that you’re enjoying what you’re reading (and listening to). It’s an honor to build this company before your eyes.

Knowledge Partner

Herewith, some of the incredible work that you might have missed during another exceptionally busy week at Puck. And please sign up for Dylan Byers' new private email, In the Room, about what's really going down in the corner offices of the most important media companies. Also, stick around, below the fold, for the backstory on how it all came together.

SILICON VALLEY:

Mark Zuckerberg called Dylan Byers, and opened up about Facebook’s troubles, and its future.

HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni warns that streaming only seems like the tsunami; in reality, Hollywood needs to get ready for the metaverse! 

WASHINGTON:

Yes, of course, the billionaire tax was a fever dream. Check out Teddy Schleifer’s incredible piece on the frontlines of the wealth protection industry.

WALL STREET:

Bill Cohan offers a Joycean portrait of the young David Zaslav. It’s a dealmaking bildungsroman that you won’t want to miss.

KNOWLEDGE PARTNER

How cities can adapt to climate change

Cop26 leaders meet in the U.K. next week at arguably the most vital UN Climate Change Conference ever to take place. The world is now subject to increasing climate-related risks, and nowhere more so than cities where the built environment can exacerbate climate hazards, which in turn put pressure on urban systems.  A recent report, written by C40 Cities and McKinsey Sustainability, examines adaptations that city leaders can consider as they address the climate risks facing their cities. The research identifies a set of 15 high-potential actions that can work for many types of cities, based on their risk-reduction potential, cost, feasibility, and stakeholder complexity.

Learn more

When I was just starting out in the media business, I worked for the legendary Graydon Carter, the peerless and longtime editor of Vanity Fair. In those years, Graydon’s office was filled with some of the extraordinary artifacts from his various journeys—beautifully bound notebooks, volumes of old Spy magazines, coat check receipts from the grand hotels of Europe, first editions signed by the authors he’d edited and commissioned. But my very favorite objet d’art was a framed quote attributed to Slim Aarons, the well-known photographic chronicler of high WASP splendor: “Editing is the art of elimination.”

What is editing? I get asked this question all the time, and it’s a valid one. It’s actually one of those vocations that’s damn near impossible to explain, even for editors themselves. I can tell you quite convincingly what a hedge fund manager, biology teacher, trust and estate lawyer, or helicopter pilot does. But an editor is more intangible: it’s the invisible hand in the creative endeavor; the pace car that encourages the talent to trust themselves; the vessel that points them in a direction, and remains quietly present along the way to nurture their vision, all the while confident that there are few more satisfying professional sensations than presenting a new idea into the world. 

Or something like that. Regardless, Aarons was right: like so much else, this process begins with elimination, with weeding out what isn’t important, what everyone else knows, what’s replicable. Especially in today’s world, where most of us wake up to fourteen zillion email newsletters, unread tweets, and grams. 

I was thinking of the Aarons quote a bit this week for a couple reasons. On one level, as we build Puck I am constantly reminded of how some of the wisdom that guided our industry's past is applicable to the future of media. Aarons’s heyday was smack in the middle of the magazine era, when editors were paid to publish only what truly mattered. In recent years, during the rise of so-called web 2.0, we ignored much of this discernment; the internet often felt like a teeming bazaar. I think we are through that stage now, and headed toward a more elevated and curated experience as the firmament that was once known as the magazine industry is being remade on mobile, direct-to-consumer platforms. 

At least I hope so. And I certainly hope that Puck subscribers enjoy the fact we aren’t trying to give you everything—instead, we want to offer only what you can’t get anywhere else.

KNOWLEDGE PARTNER

To that end, I was reminded of another underappreciated attribute of the trade—all the conversations and subtle decisions that play a role in shaping and defining the work that we publish. To wit: Earlier this week, Puck co-founder and C.O.O. Liz Gough and I headed to Los Angeles for various meetings and engagements and check-ins with clients and our founding partners. On Tuesday morning, we were due to meet Dylan Byers for coffee in West Hollywood to talk about the business strategy behind his new private email, In the Room, which is dedicated to his scrupulous and insiderly reporting on the movers and shakers of the media business. (I urge you to sign up here.)

But before our coffee had even arrived, Dylan alerted us that he was due to speak to Mark Zuckerberg in a few hours. Of course, that bit of news derailed everything and we began chatting about Facebook’s travails, its forthcoming pivot to the A.I.-inflected metaverse, and whether Zuck, himself, would use this as a way to segue out into a more honorific capacity at the parent company. I get no greater excitement than being a reporter’s cornerman in the moment before a big interview. Liz and I were thrilled to watch Dylan pick through the issues and begin, in very real time, to plot out his path of inquiry. Naturally, we decided that the inaugural edition of In the Room would be accelerated to feature Dylan’s perspicacious interview and profile of Zuckerberg at this critical point in his career. You can check out the piece here, but I really do recommend signing up for Dylan’s email. His news will come right to your inbox.

Moreover, the highlight of my week is our standing Monday editorial meeting when all of Puck’s august journalists convene to check in with each other, offer the latest on their reporting work, and suggest ideas for one another. In these settings, it’s occasionally the smallest tangents that resound loudest. For instance, during Monday’s meeting, David Zaslav’s name came up. As the group discussed various theories about his plans for the Warner Media assets, such as HBO, Bill made a side comment about the research he had completed on Zaslav's earliest days as a media executive for his forthcoming book about GE.

Sure, most people know Zaslav as the 61-year-old Discovery C.E.O. who recently architected the marquee acquisition of the streaming age. But few people knew the Zaslav that Bill had uncovered in his reporting: the quiet protégé of Jack Welch, who relied on shrewd dealmaking and gumption to create a little network called CNBC that would remake cable. Again, the art of elimination.

Were it not for Bill’s comment, I’m not sure we ever would have had Portrait of the Zaz as a Young Dealmaker, his incredible article that we published earlier this week. I knew the piece broke through when a CNBC producer texted me to ask for a free subscription to read the article. I laughed. The metaverse may be coming, but cable news is still a profit machine. He could afford it. 

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

Jon

P.S. - if there's something holding you back from becoming a subscriber, I'd love to hear about it. Please feel free to reply to this email with your feedback (replies go directly to my inbox).