Good morning, Belated happy New Year! It was an incredible week: Matt Belloni reassessed Shari Redstone’s sale; Dylan Byers inspected The Washington Post transfer portal; Lauren Sherman offered a Talmudic reading of the Blazy sitch and other designer musical chairs; Bill Cohan and Kim Masters plumbed Iger’s succession options; John Ourand checked in with Scott Van Pelt about that Stephen A. money; Tara Palmeri offered some models for Biden’s legacy; and Abby Livingston analyzed the latest geriatric crisis on the Hill. Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

Lauren Sherman chats with Jonathan Anderson about his moonlight gig in Hollywood, and offers a half-dozenish predictions for 2025. and… Sarah Shapiro traces the Skims cultural arc.

Marion Maneker reveals why Sotheby’s backpedaled their new fee structure.

Matt Belloni declares Shari Redstone his unlikely hero of the year. and… Scott Mendelson combs the holiday box office receipts for clues about the coming year.

Bill Cohan and Kim Masters, Puck’s newest partner, assess the entertainment dealmaking landscape and Iger’s succession gauntlet.

Dylan Byers chronicles the turnover at The Washington Post. and… John Ourand chats with ESPN stars about the network’s new course and the crisis in professional golf.

Tara Palmeri imagines some Biden legacy counterfactuals. and… Abby Livingston inspects the roiling Kay Granger micro-crisis on the Hill.

I occasionally get slightly nostalgic this time of year, the post-holiday hangover period that many associate with the return to normalcy and the 5 p.m. sunset grind, because it offers a very different set of connotations and reveries for me. Four years ago, amid the peak of Covid, I recall spending this week on endless calls with lawyers and investors and future partners—but mainly lawyers—incorporating Puck and formally beginning the extensive legal process that would lead to our Series A investment. I’m not the sedentary type, and I’m surely not the pandemic type, and by January of 2021, I can assure you that I was driving my family apoplectic—an unfortunately requisite leg of the entrepreneurial journey. They’d unwittingly rode shotgun as I had spent innumerable months on Zooms and Google Meets pitching a novel subscription-focused media company focused on the inside conversation, built on a model that enshrined talent with equity and bonuses befitting their exemplary influence. And by the winter, understandably, they’d had enough. So instead of rolling calls from my home office in our old attic, I took my work on the road. I’d layer up and walk to the local tennis courts, pacing around for hours while I took legal notes and chatted into my ear buds, always cognizant of what I was paying out of pocket per hour. I don’t measure my steps with an Apple watch, but I’m a lifelong runner with a pretty solid internal pacer, and I knew I circled those courts hundreds of times, kicking ratty water-logged tennis balls out of the way as I asked questions, offered my spiel, and sought definitions of complex legal concepts that I didn’t fully grasp. Inevitably, I lost track of time as I daydreamed about the promise of Puck, and the possibility of convening a generationally talented group of journalists and operators and simultaneously encouraging and incentivizing them to produce the best work of their careers. Sometimes I shuddered at the thought of what nearby homebound onlookers thought of my bizarre, decontextualized, circularized digressions. In fact, when the Times ran a brief article about Puck’s initial capitalization a few months later, my neighbor sent me a text noting, So that’s what you were doing all that time… So I always smile at this cold part of the calendar, recalling where Puck started and envisioning where my partners’ achievements will take us in the new year. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of this company is that it’s composed of incredible people who have chosen to be here both by choice and necessity—because they excessively love their craft and wholeheartedly believe that journalism is desperately in need of new business models and ideas and they’ve heeded the call to leadership, themselves. During this long, somnolent break, I was contacted by a fellow media entrepreneur who was absolutely exasperated by the breadth, depth, and quality of the work Puck was producing amid the holiday malaise. We wouldn’t have it any other way, I assured him. In Hollywood’ Hero of the Year… Is Bailing on Hollywood, Matt Belloni offers a near term retrospective of Shari Redstone’s still-closing Paramount deal—not only what it means for her family’s legacy, and for the Ellisons, but the entire creative community. In Politico, Brother, Where Art Thou?, Dylan Byers inspects the latest D.C. media transfer portal rumblings and detects a far more seismic and chilling trend in the Potomac. Meanwhile, Lauren Sherman uncovers some foreboding leitmotifs in the luxury business in Slaughterhouse ’25, while Tara Palmeri writes a first draft of the exiting president’s legacy with the White House scholar Doug Brinkley in Biden & His Discontents. Meanwhile, in Bristol, John Ourand offers the latest ESPN kremlinology in What Moves the “Needle-Movers”? But if you only have time to read one piece this weekend, I’d turn your attention to Hollywood’s “Everything Is on the Table” Year, an incredible dialogue between Bill Cohan and our newest partner, Kim Masters, the legendary Hollywood chronicler, who officially begins her tenure at Puck next month. Kim and Bill get into the manifold challenges and mysteries facing the entertainment industry—the cable albatross, the Ellisons’ arrival, Bob Iger’s succession, and so much more. These are the stories of our time, expertly told, and precisely what you should expect from Puck, this time of year or any other.

Have a great weekend, Jon

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