Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon digest of Puck’s best new reporting.

First up today, Matt Belloni breaks the news that Skydance’s David Ellison is in talks with David Rhodes—the former CBS News head and current Sky executive—to potentially retake the helm at CBS News, and run the operation day-to-day alongside The Free Press’s Bari Weiss, pending an acquisition of her center-right media brand. Plus, Matt digs into the shocking cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Then, below the fold: Julia Ioffe charts the ripple effects after the mass firing of 1,300 State Department officials. Ian Krietzberg brilliantly dissects the latest A.I. coding roadblock. John Ourand chronicles Dave Portnoy’s rise from media provocateur to Fox Sports frontman. And exclusively for Inner Circle members, Lauren Sherman examines the headwinds facing the Montreal-based, family-founded retailer Ssense.

Meanwhile, on the pods: Dylan Byers reunites with Julia Alexander on The Grill Room to break down Substack’s $1.1 billion valuation. On Fashion People, Lauren and Michael Grynbaum discuss his buzzy new tome about the halcyon days of Condé Nast. On Impolitic, John Heilemann and comms wizard Lis Smith evaluate Trump’s curious approach to the Epstein saga. And on The Powers That Be, Leigh Ann Caldwell connects with Julia Ioffe to candidly assess Marco Rubio’s tenure as secretary of State.

HOLLYWOOD

As Paramount prepares to remake itself, David Rhodes has emerged as a likely successor at CBS News, possibly advised by Bari Weiss. And company insiders suggest that the Colbert cancellation was purely economic, but is that buyable?

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WASHINGTON

Guess what: The mass firing of 1,300 career State Department officials has resulted in the predictable chaos, anger, recriminations, and occasional bouts of gallows humor at town halls and on message boards. Naturally, everyone inside Foggy Bottom only expects things to get worse.

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A.I.

A new study confirmed what many artificial intelligence skeptics have long championed, and what its own researchers didn’t expect: A.I. coding tools don’t always speed up users’ workflow. In fact, the technology can slow them down. As one MIT researcher put it: “The need for people to gain deep expertise in the topics they work on is not going away.”

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SPORTS

Talks between Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy and Fox Sports kicked off with horse racing, but soon moved to something more ambitious: a deal that would give Portnoy and his buds a new platform, bequeath the Big Ten a true-blue booster of their own, and offer Fox the kind of trouble that they could use right now.

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FASHION

For the no-counter-culture generation, the Canadian retailer established itself as a place to discover new brands, and rode high during the pandemic e-commerce boom: The company was valued at $4 billion, growing in China, and seemingly flirting with an I.P.O. Four years later, though, the market has changed, and tariffs aren’t going anywhere. At some point, something has to give.

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MEDIA

Julia Alexander reunites with Dylan for a wide-ranging chat about the most pressing plotlines consuming the media industry: what Substack’s recent $1.1 billion valuation portends for the creator economy writ large; Apple’s $150 million offer for F1 and the streamer’s broader sports media ambitions; David Ellison’s courtship to bring Bari Weiss to CBS News; and much, much more.

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FASHION

Lauren’s guest today is Michael Grynbaum, whose new book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, published earlier this week. They dive into the past, present, and future of Condé Nast—from the Anna-Graydon-Tina golden age to the current financial headwinds facing the company, and everything in between. And, of course, they dig into the ongoing race to succeed Anna at American Vogue.

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WASHINGTON

John welcomes Democratic communications wizard Lis Smith—whose clients have run the gamut from Pete Buttigieg and Mallory McMorrow to Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer—to discuss the unprecedented political crisis Donald Trump is facing among his supporters over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

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WASHINGTON

Julia Ioffe joins guest host Leigh Ann Caldwell to unpack the implications of the sweeping layoffs at the State Department, which have left 1,300 staffers out in the cold. Then they examine Marco Rubio’s tenure as secretary of State, and illuminate his emerging role as a key architect of Trump’s evolving foreign policy—while he sidesteps his actual duty to manage the reorganization of the State Department.

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