CNN Whispers, Netflix Worries, Biden’s Bounce

Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory—our weekly digest of the best work at Puck.

It was another incredible week—Teddy Schleifer revealed the inner workings of the wealthiest tech moguls, Dylan Byers assessed the panic levels inside CNN, Julia Ioffe reported on D.C.’s diplomatic crisis, and Tara Palmeri explained how the town is monitoring Biden’s new momentum. Meanwhile, Tina Nguyen detailed Liz Cheney’s Big Lie while Matt Belloni answered the question everyone is asking in Hollywood and Eriq Gardner delivered the goods on the sickest talent agency lawsuit imaginable.

Check out these stories, along with the rest of our best work from the week, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

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WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri details how everyone in D.C. is re-orienting themselves over the Biden Bounce.
and…
Julia Ioffe reveals how a senatorial power struggle has led to a diplomatic crisis.
and and…
Tina Nguyen explains how Liz Cheney red-pilled the libs.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer enters the clandestine world of the Peninsula’s most powerful family offices.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni details whether Netflix’s turnaround engine is working.
and…
Julia Alexander runs the numbers on House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power.
and and…
Eriq Gardner has the goods on the sickest agency lawsuit in human history.

MEDIA:
Eriq also breaks the news on CNN’s headache-inducing lawsuit.
and…
Dylan Byers gathers the notes from the network’s panic room.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan skillfully envisions how Dan Loeb might restack the Disney board.

PODCASTS:
Peter Hamby and I discuss the Linear Big Bang on The Powers That Be.
and…
Matt analyzes the biggest stars under 30 on The Town.

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Innovation Eternal

On Tuesday morning, I wiped off the post-Labor Day ennui and headed to the airport for a trip to Los Angeles for Kara Swisher’s final Code conference. As many readers of this weekly column know, Kara has for decades been a peerless innovator in our space and an important role model for me. She wasn’t the first traditional journalist to explore entrepreneurship—Mike Moritz, as some may recall, was a Time writer before seeding some of the most important companies of our age at Sequoia—but she was unquestionably the most cogent in personifying a simple, yet elegant point: many of the people who make media are actually the ones who should be running media businesses. Kara had her first bite of the apple when she co-created The Wall Street Journal’s All Things D before spinning off on her own to co-found Recode with Walt Mossberg, which she later sold to Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media.

Early in my career, a senior executive at Condé Nast pithily summed up what he believed had been the true underlying genius of Vanity Fair. Graydon Carter, my old boss and mentor, hadn’t just created a magazine; instead, he animated a world and brought it to life every year at his annual Oscar party, which moved from the site of the old Morton’s to The Sunset Tower to the Annenberg, always beautifully designed by Basil Walter. Graydon’s party remained the most important event on the Hollywood calendar, and eventually the most important event of the year for the entire Sun Valley set. Kara’s Code, in many ways, carried forth that tradition. It was by far the most important event in the tech industry, which as we all know, is now essentially every industry. Kara’s interviews with Steve Jobs and a young Zuckerberg in that patented red chair are still the stuff of legend.

This year’s shebang threw even more tokens in the legend meter. Her guests included Bob Iger, Sundar Pichai, Amazon C.E.O. Andy Jassy, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Amy Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and so many more. But perhaps the most impressive part is that she conducts the majority of interviews herself. I can readily admit that I was a little tired and parched after each day’s programming, and I was sitting in the air-conditioned ballroom of the Beverly Hilton drinking cold brew. I can only imagine what it was like to be on stage for eight hours, thinking on your feet the entire time, intellectually jousting with some of the most important innovators in our culture.

I tend to feel all the feels this time of year in L.A. Many decades ago, my mother, then a teenager, was a shop girl at the Beverly Hilton when a young Elvis came down to buy the paper and gave her a wink. My grandmother was one of the first female reporters in the Hollywood trade press in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Some of my earliest memories come from taking walks with her from her apartment on Durant Drive around the Peninsula, in Beverly Hills, just as the hotel was being constructed in the ‘80s. To her, it was the Taj Mahal. I was reflecting on these memories while watching Kara work her magic, all the while looking forward to breaking bread with my L.A.-based colleagues that night at The Tower Bar.

As I walked out of Code, however, it dawned on me that Kara’s biggest accomplishment wasn’t the conference’s longevity or its speaker list, or even the extraordinarily well-heeled crowd that showed up to attend. Instead it was the simple fact, as she acknowledged on her Pivot podcast, that the high-wattage-live-interview-with-tech-C.E.O. format that she pioneered all those years ago has now begun to grow stale. In the past decade-plus, everyone has tried to rip off Code. And rather than keep it going for the sake of keeping it going, she wanted to innovate again.

For generations, media businesses attempted to find a formula and then stick with it eternally. Change was a four letter word, a surefire way of losing money. Those days are behind us, of course. Now, change is the only constant in our industry. And, once again, Kara is leading the way.

Have a great weekend,
Jon