On Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting in my hotel room in Washington, D.C., Zooming with my colleagues, catching up on emails, you know the drill. It’d been an exciting week in the capital, one of Puck’s fastest-growing markets, with all the familiar charms: a number of off-the-record meetings in Georgetown, dinner at Café Milano (for old time’s sake), lunch at the Jefferson, great people-watching, and a trip to the White House for one of the annual holiday parties. The highlight of the trip, however, was an event that Puck co-hosted on Tuesday evening at the top of the Riggs, my favorite new-ish hotel in town, with our pals at Arnold Ventures to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the First Step Act, the historic bipartisan prison reform bill.
It was an unseasonably warm night in the district, and the rooftop views of the town decked out in its yuletide best were unmatched. Maybe it was the holidays, but the vibe in the room was significantly more genial than many expect of this often cantankerous city, especially as it embarks upon a national election season. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, very likely our next speaker, offered a moving soliloquy about the importance of the bill. His partner in the legislation, former Rep. Doug Collins, also spoke movingly, and the two men—one a Republican from rural Georgia and the other a Democrat from Brooklyn—embraced afterward. It was a reminder that our politics aren’t always as divided as they seem.
Meanwhile, as you might imagine, Puck sure knows how to throw a swell party, and so there was plenty of mirth in the air. It was fun rubbing shoulders with Rep. Kelly Armstrong, Holly Harris, Jonathan Capehart, Van Jones, Grover Norquist, Kelli Rhee, and my many generationally talented partners—Julia Ioffe, Tara Palmeri, Abby Livingston, Teddy Schleifer, and Tina Nguyen, among them. (I was going to hang with Peter Hamby the following night at the people’s house.)
But on that Wednesday Zoom call, my headspace was fully occupied by Puck’s other power corners. On my computer screen, I was editing Bill Cohan’s brilliant fresh reporting on Jeff Zucker’s ambitions with RedBird IMI, his new roll-up fund. Zucker, as loyal Puck readers know, is embarking on a $1.4 billion, all-in conquest to buy The Telegraph and The Spectator. (Zucker and his partners are paying about $750 million for the assets—approximately 10x EBITDA—with the rest coming as an outside loan in a very clever deal architecture.)
Despite Zucker’s new identity as an investor, Bill mused at the end of the piece about whether he’d one day, again, find himself as an operator. Bill then posited, as he has before, that he’d be an excellent leader at Paramount Global, the fading Redstone family heirloom, should Shari Redstone eventually decide to sell.
This was lurking in the background on my weekly Wednesday Zoom with Matt Belloni and our various partners about his growing empire at Puck—his thriving What I’m Hearing newsletter, podcast The Town, and events business. (He was hosting a private event in L.A. the following night. These are busy days here at Puck…) On the Zoom, I asked Matt what he was working on for his Thursday night edition of the newsletter. He responded that he’d been tipped off that David Ellison was homing in on an acquisition attempt of Paramount. My eyes widened. This was huge news. Matt said he had to jump to pin down the reporting. I started to salivate in anticipation of his newsletter draft the following night.
Sure enough, by Thursday evening, Matt had gotten the goods. His piece, Shari Inches Toward Parting With Paramount, reported that Ellison was indeed kicking the tires on the media conglomerate—and, in a new wrinkle, he was working with RedBird C.E.O. Gerry Cardinale. (Could Bill’s prophecy have been right all along, a relic of his two decades as a dealmaker at GE Capital, Lazard, Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase?) In a sign of Matt’s influence, his newsletter was published at 10:02 p.m. on Thursday evening. Soon after the market opened the next day, Paramount’s stock was up more than 14 percent.
In addition to Matt’s phenomenal scoop and Bill’s prescient Ari’s Deal & Zucker’s Next Steps, I want to turn your attention to another superb piece of Puck journalism. As I rode the Acela back to Penn Station on Thursday, I began top-editing Lauren Sherman’s probing dissertation on Condé Nast, a company I know and love, which finds itself in the midst of another layoff cycle. Much like Sumner Redstone built Viacom and CBS through shrewd deal-making before his daughter merged them into what is now Paramount Global, the Newhouses have also built and controlled Condé Nast from its modern inception.
In the most profound ways, the fates of these companies are intertwined with their ownership structures. And it’s a useful reminder that it’s not always the market that drives business cycles, but often unique individuals themselves. That’s a story as old as time, and precisely what you should expect to read about here at Puck.
Have a great weekend, Jon |