| Earlier this week, I was sitting at the Odeon, one of my favorite Manhattan haunts and a stone’s throw from Puck’s new downtown office, when my lunch companion uttered a line that prompted in me an irresistible grin. This person, a new friend and an incredible journalist, was talking enviously about my partners—pointing out how frequently they broke news and published extraordinarily acute insights in their private emails, often informing the intellectual influencers (the journalists, executives, disruptors, and principals) who define the power corridors of our culture.
I laughed, partly because I’d heard a similar refrain, one day earlier, from an old pal and mediaco C.E.O. seated just a few tables away. In both instances, I tried to graciously accept the compliments on behalf of my partners, but I couldn’t pretend to act surprised.
We started this company, after all, with the recognition that both sides of the journalism marketplace had changed, and irreversibly so. Given the sheer preponderance of content—a genetically modified word I’ll only ever speak as a second language—consumers had too many choices, and the gruel was often too thin. Sophisticated readers increasingly wanted to select their information intake with the same powers of curation that guided other parts of their lives—and they wanted to read work that would improve them, professionally and cerebrally, and it didn’t hurt if they laughed from time to time. (It never does…)
Similarly, it was no longer sufficient to simply read an author’s finished product. To subscribe to their work meant to subscribe to them, and have access to all their powers of wisdom and wit, the murmurs they were imbibing, and the thoughts they were hypothesizing. As I’ve noted relentlessly in this column in the past, elite journalists are extraordinary amalgams of writers, storytellers, domain experts, conveners, and omniscient consultants. We’ve tried to bottle this powerful elixir in our private emails, the molecular unit of Puck. Whether it’s Matt Belloni’s brilliant What I’m Hearing or Lauren Sherman’s peerless Line Sheet, my lunch companions were right: readers are frequently dazzled and delighted by fresh news and insights that don’t always make it into a traditional article—and that readers literally can’t find anywhere else.
I smiled at lunch, too, because I’d recently been reminded of this, myself. On Tuesday, Julia Ioffe began the preamble of her edition of The Best & The Brightest, Puck’s Capitol Hill-and-White House-read private email, by disclosing that she’d been hearing that prisoner negotiation talks between the U.S. and Russia had become extremely advanced. The chatter, she said, had reached the point where she believed that even Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan were involved. “Watch this space,” she noted. Two days later, it was announced that an agreement had been reached to return both men to the United States. Blessedly, Gershkovich and Whelan stepped foot on U.S. soil on Thursday evening.
Indeed, as I was racing to the Odeon, I was scanning an early draft of Dylan Byers’ piece on my phone. A day earlier, in his piece Norah the Explorer, Dylan had broken the news that Norah O’Donnell would soon be segueing to a new role at CBS News, and her anchor chair would be filled not by one host but a revolving crew. In his email the subsequent day, he noted artfully: “For the record, CBS News has not said or confirmed this, but… well, this is why you pay for Puck.” CBS sent around a handout to the general media later that day.
If you only have time to read one piece this week, I’d turn your attention to Tara Palmeri’s excellent story, Turmoil in Trumpworld, which cuts through the widely disseminated (and often reductive) narratives about the inner workings of Mar-a-Lago post-Harris. As Tara tells it, the knives are predictably out, but perhaps not for whom you might expect. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of news and extraordinarily acute insight you can only find at Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
