Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

I’m en route to Los Angeles following an eventful week in New York, meeting with a number of you and talking about the rest of you—and dealing with the fallout from CNN, where speaking about the morning show switcheroo now requires a trigger warning. For friends and sources: I’m in L.A. all next week, then back in New York the following Monday for our final Powers That Be event of the quarter, where my partner Bill Cohan will be chatting off the record with David Solomon, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs. The event is invitation only.

In tonight’s email, Puck co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly and I trade notes on some of the most compelling media storylines of the day, from the British Invasion to the new CNN agita, plus a little dish. Happy Friday.

But first…

🇺🇸 An Avlon ’24 scoop: John Avlon, the CNN anchor and senior political analyst, intends to run for Congress this year in New York’s 1st congressional district, according to two sources with knowledge of his plans. On Thursday, Avlon told colleagues he would be leaving CNN to “embark on a new chapter and pursue an opportunity that felt too purposeful to pass up,” but offered no further specifics. Avlon has not yet filed to run and has made no final decision. He declined to comment, but sources assured me that he is strongly considering the bid and that it was the reason for his departure from the network.

Avlon and his wife, Margaret Hoover, the host of PBS’s Firing Line and a fellow CNN commentator, have a home in Sag Harbor. The bid would test the extent of his appeal there: New York’s 1st encompasses the Hamptons, sure, but many residents of East Hampton, Sagaponack, and Montauk have their primary residence in Manhattan (and, increasingly, Brooklyn). The district also covers more blue-collar parts of Suffolk County and has been red since 2015—first under four-term Republican congressman Lee Zeldin and, since last year, Republican Rep. Nick LaLota. Trump won the district handily in the last two cycles.

Avlon, who started his career as a speechwriter for Mayor Rudy Giuliani before pursuing journalism and becoming editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018, has long been an advocate for centrism: He was a co-founder of the nonpartisan No Labels movement and has written books promoting a rational centrist politics and criticizing the “lunatic” fringes. At CNN, he has also been a vocal Trump critic. In his final column for the network this week, he called on citizens to become more civically engaged and resist “sleepwalking” into dictatorship. “We cannot simply wait for someone to come save us,” he wrote. “Democracy is our responsibility.”

🎲 Spotted in Las Vegas: Former CNN chief Chris Licht, breakfasting with CBS News and Sports correspondent Dana Jacobson at Primrose in the Park MGM.

📺 In other CNN news: Mark Thompson & Co. are still in negotiations over Poppy Harlow and Phil Mattingly’s futures at the network after their morning show ends later this month, though Thompson has indicated to both parties that he wants to keep them in new roles. Most sources expect Mattingly, an internally beloved rising star, to land well. Meanwhile, Wolf Blitzer is very much okay after appearing sick on-air last night. I’m told he was reluctant to forfeit the anchor chair and tried to convince his concerned producers to let him back on the broadcast.

🦚 Meanwhile, at 30 Rock: With CNN waving the white flag in the mornings, I couldn’t help but be reminded of NBC’s fortitude in those hours, across various constituencies. Obviously, there’s MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a White House must-watch and the most influential political talk show along the Acela corridor after nearly two decades—a testament, above all else, to Joe Scarborough, even if he and Mika often phone it in from Florida. And then there’s CNBC’s Squawk Box, where Andrew Ross Sorkin & Co. have retained their status as the principal forum for the executive class, even as Bloomberg and many others have tried to catch them. And, of course, the mass-market Today, where Savannah and Hoda remain neck-and-neck with GMA and are riding out the decline of linear television as best they can.

👓 The Edwardian Era: Edward Enninful, the revered outgoing editor of British Vogue who might have one day replaced Anna Wintour—but for strained internal politics or, perhaps, his recognition of print’s diminished stature (choose your own adventure)—has published his last issue. Fittingly, the final cover is a mic-drop testament to himself. Forty supermodels and celebrities came together for this photo—from Adwoa Aboah and Naomi Campbell to Amber Valletta and Serena Williams, with (who else?) Oprah in the middle. Sure, it’s about the women, many of whom have graced his iconic covers, but it’s really a statement of his stature in the industry. Imagine the lift required to get these 40 stars to pose together and sit for interviews praising Prince Edward?

“This marks the end of an era of image-making,” Lauren Sherman, my Puck partner, rightly noted. (Her favorite cover was Adwoa, mine was Beyoncé.) I am more preoccupied by what comes next, or perhaps what might have been. Arguably, Enninful had his greatest professional leverage 18 months ago, when he published his memoir. What if he had left Condé Nast then and found the financial backers to stand up his own platform—positioning himself as an owner, rather than a mere creative? Imagine how he could have leveraged his close relationships with all these megawatt stars to build out various content businesses and collaborations? What if he himself became the Oprah of fashion? The money was always there, but perhaps it’s not too late.

💨 Shachtman out, Piers D.T.C.: Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman is resigning from the magazine over editorial differences with Napoleonic C.E.O. Gus Wenner, per NYT. … Across the pond, Piers Morgan tells Semafor he’s leaving his TalkTV show to focus on his YouTube channel.

I’ve been hearing Tina Brown talk about the halcyon days of the magazine trade since I was in short pants, but she made a couple of novel points that I hadn’t previously considered. To wit: She pointed out that she was part of a veritable British (and Canadian) invasion of editors to descend upon the business, and credibly re-invent it, during the ’80s and early ’90s: herself, Anna Wintour, Graydon, James Truman, Glenda Bailey, etcetera.

Tina noted that many of these expats had a more commercial appreciation for journalism—yes, yes, they were all people of letters, sure, but they also viewed the profession as an input in a business model rather than a sort of quasi-academic higher calling, a protected class, and so on. I’m not here to debate her thesis—I agree with it, and our company espouses a similar philosophy, and then some—but she also noted that something similar is happening now. After all, Brits are running a number of top American bastions of journalism these days, and causing some controversy in the process by not playing by the old rules.

Mark Thompson, the fearless leader who doesn’t get enough credit for rescuing the Times Company from the bygone predatory Carlos Slim loan and decades of mismanagement, is rebuilding CNN in plain sight and boldly signaling that familiar formats, like morning TV, are no longer sacrosanct. Emma Tucker, the still-newish editor of The Wall Street Journal, has already had a meaningful impact on her digital pages and made deeply unpopular personnel switcheroos. And Will Lewis is under pressure to reverse that –$100 million on the Washington Post income statement. So, do you agree with Tina that these unsentimental Brits offer an antidote to corners of American media?

Dylan: Wholeheartedly. This is a business, after all, not a right, and it’s a point too many journalists bemoaning the state of their industry still don’t seem eager to reckon with. But it’s not just the Brits’ appreciation for the commercial nature of the business. Spend more than five minutes at the latest journalist du jour’s book party in SoHo or Georgetown, and it’s evident this has once again become an overly stuffy and self-serious industry, stifled by conventions that force us to forget that, in addition to winning Pulitzers, we’re supposed to be having fun. The Fleet Street veterans bring a sense of swagger and mischief, and a low tolerance for navel-gazing and second-guessing. At its best, this enables a more exciting and potentially impactful journalism. (Sure, it has its downsides. I’m not recommending anyone hack lawmakers’ phones).

I look at Mark, Will, Emma, and it seems to me their priorities are in the right place. That said, as I’ve noted many times, there’s a crucial distinction between intention and execution.

Take CNN: Mark is asking all the right questions, but does he have a strategy yet that goes beyond bringing back digital growth wunderkind Alex MacCallum? You say he doesn’t get enough credit for the Times’ oft-cited digital pivot—true, the praise often finds its way to Meredith Kopit Levien, his successor—but it’s also important to remember, as any Sulzberger will tell you, that this wasn’t his strategy. He executed it brilliantly, but now it’s on him to articulate the strategy himself.

Take the Post: Lewis threw a thousand abstract ideas at the wall in his recent interview with Semafor, but are any of these tweaks actually going to reverse the Post’s fortunes if it’s still just one among several politics- and policy-focused news orgs in a highly saturated market? The verdict is still out on Tina’s thesis.

Jon: I agree, particularly, on the last point. According to my math—and I’m not a banker, though sometimes I feel like one—the Post’s recent mass layoffs barely cover over half of that deficit. Anyway, let’s stick with CNN for one more beat. You made an excellent point in your piece Less Than Harlow, and then on The Powers That Be with our partner, Peter Hamby, that the cost structures of CNN’s TV business are changing—in particular as it pertains to anchors. From here on out, there will be fewer stars and they will make less—which, itself, will mean that agencies may put less investment behind these parts of their portfolios. Has that chill already penetrated CNN?

Dylan: It’s certainly discouraging for ambitious on-air talent who aspired to climb the linear ladder and one day arrive at a formidable seven-figure salary, à la Jake Tapper or Don Lemon. Indeed, Kaitlan Collins may be the last anchor to achieve a low- to mid-seven-figure salary upon her ascension from White House correspondent to morning host and then to primetime. (Thanks to Chris Licht for repeatedly retriggering those contract negotiations by moving her around so much.) The future obviously looks different. As former director-general of the BBC, Thompson knows he can pay far less for hosts to read from a teleprompter, probably about as well as the current incumbents. And as the business contracts with the decline of the cable bundle, he’ll have to.

The challenge for all this talent, of course, is that they have extremely limited leverage. Where would Kaitlan or Jake go? Lemon was a cable news star, and even he’s been forced to test success on Twitter (X, whatever). Broadcast news is in decline, offers extremely limited real estate, and, given all the M&A machinations at play, some of those networks may not even exist in a few years. Meanwhile, the politics of MSNBC and Fox News don’t easily align with many of these people’s brands (MSNBC is easier, of course, as Ana Cabrera and Chris Jansing have shown). The best available option for most people is to stick it out and pray that Thompson is actually going to make this thing work on streaming and mobile. Good luck!

Jon: As all this familiar Sturm und Drang is playing out at CNN, David Zaslav is working through the afterglow of this still-nebulous WBD-ESPN-Fox mega sports merger announcement. This is obviously a sort of Puck chew toy for the ages, and our partners have already begun to pick apart the deal. There’s a lot we don’t know, sure, but I’m curious to see how this jives with your philosophy of the industry and where it’s headed.

Dylan: This Zaz-Iger-Lachlan marriage isn’t the silver bullet some people think it is. It’s a sign of existential crisis. As I noted earlier this week, Disney, WBD, and Fox are trying to solve a problem for themselves and get points for innovation without actually addressing the underlying business model challenges. I watch the NFL, NBA, soccer, and tennis, and running some back-of-the-napkin math, the most cost-effective strategy for me is still probably YouTube TV with ESPN+ on top. Maybe this triumvirate can add some incentives along the way, but until one of them buys Paramount and gets Brian Roberts to play ball, they’ve got a long way to go. And meanwhile, as our dear colleague John Ourand notes, the leagues are pissed, which may affect future negotiations.

I am certainly impressed with the Bismarckian diplomacy it must have taken to bring this team of rivals together. They’re still competitors, by the way, which will make governance and revenue sharing complicated. No doubt that was led by Iger, who followed this news with a slew of announcements on the Disney earnings call: a $1.5 billion Epic Games investment, streaming rights to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film, an ESPN contract for Nick Saban, etcetera. The Information’s Martin Peers smartly noted that Iger seems to be running a sort of reelection campaign against Nelson Peltz and other critics, enlisting Taylor and Saban and Fortnite to help. (It reminds me of Obama bringing Springsteen out on the campaign trail in the final stretch of 2012.)

Of course, Disney’s actual earnings picture was mixed at best. And as several media execs reminded me, the non-parks businesses are still challenged: linear networks continue to dive, advertising is terrible, etcetera. But, hey, we’ve got a new sports package! And Taylor is coming to Disney! It’s peak Fantasia, with Iger as Mickey.

And even the Disney forced narrative is undercut by the fact that the company, which is buying out Hulu from Comcast, will now have three sports streamers in this bundle, the future ESPN bundle, and Hulu + Live Sports. That reality underscores the fact that the story here isn’t a radical disruption of the sports-media landscape. It’s the frantic battlefield realignment one strikes upon realizing that the enemy of the enemy is their friend. As for our man Zaz, anyone care to take a look at the $WBD stock?