Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, your weekly review of the best new work from Puck.

Sure, I say this all the time, but it simply remains true: It was another utterly fabulous week here at Puck. Matt Belloni answered Yellowstone burning questions; Julia Alexander reported from a far-flung theater of the streaming wars; Lauren Sherman interrogated some Pinault M&A murmurs; Dylan Byers captured the pillow screams emanating from 30 Rock; Baratunde Thurston envisioned the next misinformation frontier; Bill Cohan uncovered a Redstone riddle; Julia Ioffe dissected a Putin propaganda fantasy; and Tara Palmeri elucidated Trump’s fundraising insecurity complex.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan identifies another Apollo option at Paramount and marks the end of the Jack Welch era.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer spills the tea on Silicon Valley muse and V.P. aspirant Nicole Shanahan.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers conveys all the agony emanating from Ronna-gate.
and…
John Ourand offers some Adam Silver and NBA media rights kremlinology.
and…
Eriq Gardner chats with the lawyer taking on the NCAA.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni answers burning questions about Yellowstone, Disney, Apple TV+, and more.
and…
Julia Alexander investigates the most surprising entrant into the streaming wars.

WASHINGTON:
Julia Ioffe explains Putin’s latest disinformation quest, while Baratunde Thurston envisions strategies for survival in the ’24 info wars.
and…
Tara Palmeri portrays Trump’s money worries and the R.N.C. carnage, while Tina Nguyen explicates the Mike Johnson malaise.
and…
Peter Hamby provides the latest tranche of exclusive voter data on the election, in partnership with Echelon Insights.

PODCASTS:
Matt and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw discuss whether the streaming industry is losing relevance with Gen Z on The Town.
and…
Tara and political consultant Robin Leeds wade into Biden’s fundraising mojo on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Peter and Dylan chew over the NBC News mess on an epic episode of 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.

I grew up in the Village, back when it was grittier and bohemian, when you wouldn’t walk through Washington Square Park after dusk and 8th Street was a bazaar of haunted storefronts with murky business propositions. Now, of course, it’s all a suburb of Goldman Sachistan, and all for the better, too. As I entered Rocco’s, on 3rd Street, I had one of those New York moments where I recalled its three or four previous incarnations—a deli, another restaurant, and, I think, a chicken joint that once sponsored my youth basketball team—dating back to the ’80s. Great karma.

The turnout, unsurprisingly, was overwhelming. John, after all, is about the most beloved and respected journalist at work on a beat of his very own creation. As I walked into Rocco’s, there he was chatting with ESPN chairman and ubermensch Jimmy Pitaro. Elsewhere were Sean McManus, the retiring leader of CBS Sports; my buddy Connor Schell, the former ESPN content chief and brilliant mind behind the network’s landmark 30 for 30 series, who now runs Words & Pictures; the fantasy football legend Matthew Berry, and literally too many other dignitaries from the wide world of sports to mention. We marked the occasion by gifting John a Puck letterman jacket in honor of his industry-defining private email, The Varsity.

It is high season for The Varsity these days. Major League Baseball opened its season amid the backdrop of a gambling scandal involving its best player, Shohei Ohtani, who signed an $700 million deferred payment deal with the Dodgers a few months ago. March Madness is underway across a number of different networks—CBS, one of the few bright spots in the declining Redstone portfolio, and various other organs (TNT, TruTV, etcetera) of David Zaslav’s Warner Brothers Discovery enterprise. It’s not absurd to wonder if, this time next year, rights to all those games will be housed under one parent company. Meanwhile, the greatest enigma of our current media moment is what NBA commissioner Adam Silver is planning to do vis-a-vis his league’s new national broadcast rights package.

The sports business, after all, is a subset of the media industry. And Silver’s critical decision is a microcosm of virtually every secular trend we’re seeing course throughout the space. The NBA, which has a comparatively younger and wealthier ownership base than the other professional sports leagues, is choosing from virtually every suitor imaginable. The traditional legacy players—Disney, NBCU, WBD—want to buy their rights just as badly, if not more so, than the pure play tech companies, such as Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. Silver’s predicament is articulating a path that maximizes league revenue without alienating fans by spreading games out across too many platforms, prompting all sorts of confusion and expense.

Complicating matters, of course, is the reality that all these mediacos covet the NBA for different reasons. Bob Iger, Brian Roberts, and Zaz all presumably want to acquire as many games as possible to delay the decline of the pay TV linear bundle. Amazon, which is already wading into the NFL, sees all kinds of consumer marketing opportunities. Google, with its YouTube TV product, presumably eyes a path toward more ballasty subscriber lifetime value numbers. Netflix, on the other hand, is interested in the game’s international appeal—and its own future growth overseas.

In his typically brilliant piece, The Adam Project, John articulates these various theses and hypotheses and lays out the most compelling framework for how it might all shake out. It’s a tableau that’s compelling for anyone fascinated by our balkanizing media landscape and the new world that appears poised to replace it. And as everyone knows, interrogating that present and future is indeed the story of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon