Brand protection at the speed of culture.

When it comes to the fast-moving world of social media, yesterday’s context can become today’s controversy. As platforms evolve, keeping your brand safe demands protection that moves just as fast.

Zefr empowers brand leaders with the control, transparency, and insights to maintain media quality and consistency across evolving social platforms, ensuring your message aligns with your brand values, no matter what’s trending.

Stay one step ahead with Zefr.

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During a reporting trip to Menlo Park this week, I found myself ensconced among the Sun Valley crowd, all of whom were chewing over the same question: Will it be $24? $24.50? $25? More? In the days since David Zaslav formally hung the “For Sale” sign on Warner Bros. Discovery, his fellow media execs and friends at the Polo Bar and Polo Lounge have been feverishly debating what share price Zaz could get. But as for whom he’ll be getting it from, the collective wisdom was mostly unanimous: David Ellison.

Officially, Zaz rebuffed Ellison’s repeated majority-cash advances—at $19 a share, then $22 a share, and finally $23.50 a share—in order to review “strategic alternatives” due to “unsolicited interest” from “multiple parties.” As this crowd sees it, the reality is probably more nuanced: Despite limited interest from parties beyond the Ellisons, Zaz convinced the board that he could get a better deal, and got the green light to go see if there was a market (or try to create one), even as he was being told that he’d ultimately have to sell.

Upon announcing the sale, new parties miraculously seemed to come out of the woodwork: Comcast, Netflix, Amazon. Surely, they’re all doing their due diligence. But most insiders sense that Comcast can’t acquire it because of the political and regulatory hurdles, and that Netflix and Amazon don’t actually want it—at least not at the asking price. Meanwhile, as I noted earlier this week, Paramount has a strong case to make that it is the best bet for shareholders, in part because it offers the cleanest regulatory path. (Indeed, Trump has effectively already blessed the deal).

Presuming all that’s true—and I think that’s mostly on the money—then what comes next is effectively a game of chicken. Zaz will try to gin up the perception of demand for a post-split WBD at something closer to the ideal $30-a-share figure that some Wall Street analysts have floated, while the Ellisons try to convince shareholders that they’re really the only game in town. Depending on how that plays out, the share price offer could fluctuate marginally around the mid-$20s. But no one in Menlo actually believed it would get anywhere close to $30. Indeed, the most common answer among the parlor game participants was exactly what had Ellison already offered: $23.50.

But perhaps the most telling detail from this whole back-and-forth so far is the fact that at least one of Ellison’s proposals included an offer to make Zaz co-C.E.O. of the combined company. No one views that as anything other than a face-saving measure for Zaz, who would presumably remain in that position for a year at best without real control. But even that may reveal one of the sticking points that has caused this process to drag on. As one source told me about the offer to Zaz, “What that really tells you is that this whole dance is just about David.”

And finally, my conversation with Sarah…

Dylan Byers: You guys launched The Bulwark in 2018 in the heat of Trump’s first presidency, as a sort of merry band of Never Trumpers. Seven years later, we’re living through yet another Trump era, albeit a very different one. How do you feel about the way that The Bulwark’s mission has shifted over time?

Sarah Longwell: I don’t think any of us at The Bulwark ever thought that Trump was finished, full stop, except for maybe the two days after January 6. But once it became clear Republicans were going to resurrect him, we always had our eye on the fact that the party was changing—and whatever illusions we might have had in the early days of taking the party back and restoring the conservative movement were laid to rest.

We view ourselves now, firmly, as a pro-democracy publication that has a politically diverse audience, as well as a pretty politically diverse staff. But the one thing we won’t compromise on is that we’re not going to normalize Trump. We’re not going to act like this is just normal politics or a normal place for the Republican Party to go. And we’re gonna be clear about the fact that we think it should be fought. We’ve always been mission-oriented, but I guess that mission has shifted a bit as the world’s changed.

Brand protection at the speed of culture.

When it comes to the fast-moving world of social media, yesterday’s context can become today’s controversy. As platforms evolve, keeping your brand safe demands protection that moves just as fast.

Zefr empowers brand leaders with the control, transparency, and insights to maintain media quality and consistency across evolving social platforms, ensuring your message aligns with your brand values, no matter what’s trending.

Stay one step ahead with Zefr.

Test Zefr

From a business perspective, how do you think about capitalizing on this moment? What more can you do from here?

We just got back from a sold-out show in New York. And before that, we did a sold-out show in D.C. We’re going to these big venues, and people are craving these live events, so we’re definitely going to push into more of that. Part of it is we’ve built more than an audience; we’ve built a community. And communities are a lot stickier than audiences are. And all of this ties to the personality-driven media, which is where I think the general media environment is going.

I don’t think of us as a Substack publication. We’re a big ensemble, and we’ve become this bigger media company. For us, Substack is a distribution tool for our newsletters, the same way iTunes and Spotify are a distribution tool on the podcast side, and YouTube on the video side. We try not to live in any one of those spaces, but we want to meet everybody where they are. We’re multiplatform, and we are trying to grow in all of those streams. And we’re also thinking about what it’s going to look like when people start to reaggregate.

There are people who talk to us about buying us; there are people we talk to about buying them. Everybody in this independent space sees things cracking wide open and is trying to figure out how to become the future. That’s all I think about; I want to be the largest independent media company out there. We’re constantly assessing what are the best tools and opportunities and innovations that allow us to move forward and do that.

So when you look at David Ellison and Paramount buying The Free Press for $150 million, do you ever contemplate a similar exit, where someone who is politically aligned with The Bulwark acquires you?

Yes, well, first of all, what Bari Weiss did with The Free Press has been enormously useful for us. She gave us an amazing comp. We’re similarly sized companies, so I want to see those numbers. Let’s be honest, the $150 million for The Free Press is kind of a silly number, because they weren’t buying the media company; they were buying Bari.

At The Bulwark, we care about two things the most: influence and control. The Bulwark is paid for by advertising, subscribers, and events. We don’t need a big corporation telling us what to do. We manage to have most of our content be free, while still having a massive subscription model. It’s free because we want to have influence on the conversation. You cannot save democracy from behind a paywall. And yet, because we’re mission-based, and because people want to be part of the community, they come behind the paywall for content like The Secret Pod, which has been a massive revenue stream.

It’s very difficult for some publications to balance how you paywall content and build subscriptions, and then have influence on the broader conversation. I feel like The Bulwark is unique in that we find a way to straddle that line.

If you look at a business like The Free Press, which I believe is doing between $15 million and $20 million in annual revenue, the vast, vast majority of that was from subscriptions.

When I say we’re comparable with The Free Press, we are, but our makeup is different. We’re doing a little over $12 million in subscriptions, but we’re doing a lot more on the advertising side, as well as events, as well as audio. We have a very diversified revenue stream.

In addition to the money she made on The Free Press deal, Bari now also has control over the editorial direction at CBS News. Can you see a similar situation happening with The Bulwark?

I could see it. I think a lot of these linear folks are looking at these new media properties and wondering if these guys can solve their problems. The Bulwark’s North Star is, Don’t re-create the failing model. The business we’re in is the business of building something new. I don’t want to be mean to linear television, but it’s just a reality that it’s a declining medium. I don’t know that you gain more influence jumping on the declining medium. I think you have more influence if you figure out how, in this chaotic, disaggregating moment, to build the new thing. I don’t know if jumping on the back of one of the dinosaurs is the way to more influence.

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