Media Deal Heat, Hermès Secrets & Trump’s Veep Odds

Good morning,Thanks for reading The Backstory. It was another great week at Puck: Dylan Byers eulogized Jimmy Finkelstein’s media tragedy; Matt Belloni caught up with Byron Allen about his Paramount bid; Lauren Sherman deduced Hermès’ magic money tree formula; Bill Cohan offered a talmudic reading of a Jamie Dimon C-suite switcheroo; John Ourand scooped the $1.7 billion Orioles sale; and Julia Ioffe got the readout on Biden’s revenge calculation in the Middle East. Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

FASHION: Lauren Sherman reports on Hermès’ luxury carrot-and-stick economics.WALL STREET: Bill Cohan profiles Shari Redstone’s high-flying banker of choice. and… John Ourand breaks the news on a new private equity sports play.MEDIA: Dylan Byers captures the gestalt of The Messenger collapse and the dish around the Forbes sale. and… Eriq Gardner proffers a Taylor Swift legal saga. HOLLYWOOD: Matt Belloni chats with Byron Allen about his Paramount bid. SILICON VALLEY: Julia Alexander sniffs out a sports-adjacent streaming bubble. WASHINGTON: Peter Hamby rounds up all the gossip on the Trump veepstakes. and… Tara Palmeri and Tina Nguyen capture both sides of the R.N.C.’s fundraising woes—and Trump’s retribution. and… Teddy Schleifer details the last stand of the pro-Haley billionaires. and… Julia Ioffe conveys the Blob’s discontent with the White House’s revenge plans against Iran. PODCASTS: Matt discusses the art of studio and movie star maintenance with filmmaker Ed Zwick on The Town. and… Tara and Brian Stelter discuss how the networks are handling Trump on Somebody’s Gotta Win. and… Peter and John Ourand weigh in on the Orioles sale on The Powers That Be. Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

A Mid-Atlantic Treaty

Just after noon on Tuesday, I was sitting in a small conference room in Puck’s airy Chelsea office with our executive editor, Ben Landy, and story editor, Danny Karel, conducting our normal Zoom check in with Tara Palmeri. As is often the case, we were spitballing the topical themes of Tara’s ambit: chaos in the Trumpverse, fundraising anxieties within the Republican National Committee, and the opacity of Biden’s inner circle… you know, the leitmotifs of this leg of our forever general election. Then, at 12:08, my phone rang. It was John Ourand.As perspicacious Puck subscribers already know, John joined our growing company this week after a distinguished 18-year turn at Sports Business Journal. For the better part of the past two decades, his work has been the ne plus ultra of the sports media beat. It’s hardly any surprise, after all: John started his career in the early innings of the cable industry, writing the artfully titled Cablefax Daily newsletter. Indeed, John in many ways presaged the inevitable union of the professional sports industry and the media business. And he’s certainly been its most articulate and highly sourced narrator. When Puck decided to enter the business of sports—a new market for us, but surely a natural one—John was the only person I called. And I kept calling until he eventually joined our company.Tuesday was only John’s second day on the job, so I assumed he was having some sort of clerical headache—couldn’t get into Slack, or maybe he was trying to figure out our 401k policies, or maybe his corporate card hadn’t arrived in time for him to expense an Uber to testify before Congress as an expert on the business of sports media, a scheduled field trip that consumed his first day. I nonchalantly texted him back that I was on a Zoom and would ping him shortly thereafter. He responded instantaneously. “I have a pretty big breaking news story that won’t hold until next Thursday’s newsletter and want to talk about the best way to get it out,” he wrote. “John Angelos agreed to sell the Orioles to a group led by David Rubenstein and Mike Arougheti.” A smile immediately crossed my face. This was, of course, a perfect Puck story—the sale of a historic professional sports franchise, on the periphery of one of our core markets, to a pair of private equity zillionaires. (Rubenstein, for his part, was one of the true forefathers of the art of the L.B.O., which gave rise to the modern P.E. business.) I knew instantly that this story was going to be big, and it was a great way to introduce Puck’s readers to The Varsity, John’s new private email on the space, which we are proudly launching in partnership with WSC Sports. The first issue of The Varsity wasn’t intended to drop until February 8, so we decided to spin up a prequel of sorts for subscribers who had already signed up to receive his work. In a couple hours, after pinning down the reporting, John published his first piece for Puck: The Orioles Prepare for Private Equity Control. The story immediately coursed through the culture, and was picked up by almost every major national and sports news organization. There is one particularly interesting wrinkle in the deal, and it’s an element that is sure to catalyze future activity. The Orioles own three-quarters of MASN, which is sort of the Mid-Atlantic equivalent of the YES Network, and is the primary channel through which Beltway residents watch their baseball. (The Washington Nationals, who own the other quarter, are also up for sale, by the way.) The future of regional sports networks has become one of the roiling subplots of the media business, and developments are sure to arise here as Rubenstein and his team work through the deal close. Baseball became our national pastime, after all, by being preternaturally suited for the ascendant medium of radio. The sport’s economic future, in many ways, hangs on reimagining the business model for the streaming age. John will be touching on this theme continuously in his genre-defining reporting. And I behoove you to sign up to receive The Varsity—the first official edition will hit inboxes on Thursday evening. In the meantime, the rest of my Zoom with Tara was unbelievably fruitful. In Nowhere to Ronna, Tara lays out the horse-trading that is already beginning to take place between Ronna Romney McDaniel’s Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, which is not only mounting a nine-month national bid but also contending with utterly stupefying legal bills. This cash crunch, in so many ways, is the story of our time, and it is exactly what you should expect from Puck. Have a great weekend, Jon

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