Good morning,

Happy Saturday and welcome back to the Backstory—your weekend capsule of the best work that we are publishing at Puck. On behalf of our amazing and trailblazing team of elite journalists, thanks for spending some of your valuable weekend with us. It’s a pleasure and an honor to stand up this company before your very eyes.

It was another incredible week here at Puck. I implore you to read some of our best work, below, and stick around for the backstory on how it came together.

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MEDIA:

Dylan Byers delivers all the latest dish from inside CNN.

And…

Eriq Gardner scoops Spotify’s next crisis.

WASHINGTON:

Julia Ioffe uncovers Putin’s latest machinations.

SILICON VALLEY:

Teddy Schleifer explains the Zuckerberg-Thiel breakup.

HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni reveals the lawsuit everyone in town is talking about.

WALL STREET:

William D. Cohan reports on the C-suite view of Jeff Zucker.

THE POWERS THAT BE:

Get the real inside story on the Oscar nominations, Putin’s war games, and Jason Kilar’s future on the latest episode of The Powers that Be, hosted by Peter Hamby. 

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.

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After the Zuckerverse

For a plethora of reasons, Jeff Zucker’s resignation from CNN has been a central fixation here at Puck over the last ten days. CNN, after all, is a core pillar of Discovery’s $43 billion merger with the WarnerMedia assets, which the D.O.J. mercifully approved this week. And cable news, that step-child of journalism and reality TV, is undergoing its own very public industrial metamorphosis. Moreover, Zucker has created an extraordinary and very public career for himself–touching everything from Today to Friends to Harry Potter to, of course, Donald Trump. In some ways, he’s the Franz Ferdinand of contemporary American media.

We take the stories of our time seriously, and sometimes cover them obsessively, as necessary. Dylan Byers has broken piece after piece on the crisis, the bereavement period, and the exigencies of the fallout. Meanwhile, Matt Belloni brilliantly assessed the evolving legal quagmire of Chris Cuomo, the powder keg of the crisis, and William D. Cohan offered the historical C-suite perspective with an illuminating piece on Zucker’s tenure atop NBCU. It was quite a prolific week. 

The reporting has been extraordinary, and it’s also been oddly moving. Dylan, Matt, and Bill are writing about real people enduring unforeseen scandals in very real time. Some are millionaires, of course, but the implications are being felt by many who are not. I’ve been struck, in large part, by the continued, almost religious sense of loss emanating from CNN. Network executives inside the building continue to talk about Zucker as if he were some Christ-like figure, or a person whose wisdom they cannot live without. It’s very heavy cake.

I assume something else is also afoot, too. The digital transformation of creative businesses have often played out like civil wars pitting the corporate executives, who must focus on larger strategic questions pertaining to an industry’s future, against the creative people who make the magical thing that we’ve come to call content. In reality, both sides need each other to exist and prosper, but the relationship can easily become fractious for any number of reasons, the simplest of which is that they speak in very different tongues. And while there is a lot that can go wrong when you sacrifice present creative success for ephemeral future gains, it’s equally disastrous to blithely ignore changing consumer behaviors.

It seems to me that Zucker’s unique talent lay in the fact that he was that rare bird—an executive who could nurture and develop the talent, and a creative at heart who was articulate in the lingua franca of the boardroom. Did he micromanage chyron copy and send notes to producers many levels down the chain? Sure. But he had also been the C.E.O. of NBCU, a massive media conglomerate, well-schooled in managing the M.B.A.s at GE. For all his sins, the guy was a dealmaker who knew how to monetize I.P.

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The loss expressed by many inside CNN seems to suggest a fear that, absent Zucker, they will now be vulnerable to the oncoming beancounters unleashed by Discovery. But I don’t think that is actually true. In his courtship of Hollywood, Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav has been careful to portray himself as a talent-friendly executive who realizes that trust and relationships are the bedrock of the media business. And of course he has. Zaslav knows better than most that his company’s streaming future is predicated on rewarding and incentivizing talent, not nickel-and-diming. I also assume that Zaslav, who spent the last 15 years building Discovery into a behemoth out of some unglamorous parts, is excited about all the new opportunities at his disposal now that he is in charge of HBO, Warners, the Turner assets, and, of course, CNN. 

As some of my colleagues have indeed pointed out before me, CNN has actually never had more optionality. After Zucker pivoted the network back to the center, post-Trump, it remains the only centrist national news asset in the U.S. media market, a position that makes it a natural streaming magnet for non-political news—weather, crime stories, sports, business, international affairs, and all the other things people tune in for when the president isn’t a raving lunatic. Similarly, CNN has spent the past decade displaying its chops in the prestige-adjacent non-scripted space. The network's prolific success with the late Anthony Bourdain and, more recently, Stanley Tucci’s gastronomical travelogue, demonstrate that it has mastered the sweet spot of modern streaming—that high-end lifestyle content that people crave when they need a break from the news. Even The New York Times is doing this.

The CNN of the future will look different, but it is certain to be bigger and perhaps more creatively fulfilling. Many of the anchors fulminating over Zucker’s ouster will one day soon be making documentaries and limited series greenlighted by his successor. Though there is no doubt: that person will have quite a pair of shoes to fill.

Thanks,

Jon