CNN Trauma, Elon’s Path, Netflix Woes

The Zaz Comet, Hope Hicks, A Media Suit

Good morning,

Happy Saturday and welcome back to The Backstory.

It was another mesmerizing week at Puck—Dylan Byers captured the agony inside CNN; Julia Ioffe explained Putin’s secret weapon in Moscow; Matt Belloni prophesied on the future of Netflix; Tina Nguyen previewed Dr. Oz’s Ailesian playbook; Teddy Schleifer penetrated Peter Thiel’s brain; and Bill Cohan presaged how Elon takes hold of Twitter. Plus, Baratunde Thurston reported on how Twitter crumbled and Eriq Gardner unveiled the real media legal war we should be focused on.

Check out these stories, along with the rest of our best work from the week, via the links below. And stick around, too, for the backstory on how it all came together.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni has the Netflix receipts.
and…
Eriq Gardner on Disney’s Avengers-sized crisis.

WASHINGTON:
Tina Nguyen reports on Dr. Oz’s vicious new campaign moves.
and…
Julia Ioffe reveals the mothers who support Putin.

WALL STREET:
William D. Cohan, as only he can, uncovers Elon’s financing options.

SILICON VALLEY:
Baratunde Thurston conveys why Twitter fell.
and…
Teddy Schleifer illuminates Peter Thiel’s evolving master plan.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers has all the dish on CNN.

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.

The Washington Mall

One chilly February morning, back in 2020, right before Covid truly arrived and transformed our lives in innumerable ways, my partners and I rented out a basement conference room in The Crosby Hotel, in Soho, and invited a number of journalists to swing by and see what we’d been cooking up for the past year. One by one, for an hour each, we walked them through the presentation for our new and ambitious, still-unborn, and not-yet-even-financed media company—one in which the journalists would be treated both like influencers and owners, themselves. We outlined the tech stack, the innovative economic model, and the various ways that we would monetize their work and re-invest it in the business, all while growing the value of their equity in the company.

We didn’t know then, of course, the journey that we were commencing upon. And we couldn’t have possibly known that we’d be honing our pitch over the many months to come—to more journalists, to investors (and then, later, of course, to lawyers, accountants, designers, salespeople, and so many others)—exclusively over Zoom, and in our childrens’ bedrooms, all while home-schooling and making do with the extraordinary convulsions that ensued. Retrospective aside, however, there was something so amazingly invigorating about that day, a true threshold moment in the pre-history of Puck.

Of course, we tried to arrange the whole event with confidentiality in mind. And even this didn’t stop one media reporter from camping out at an apartment backing out onto Crosby Street and taking meticulous notes on who attended. I can’t tell you the names of all the journalists who showed up that freezing day. Though I will impart that some ended up joining our company, such as the great William D. Cohan, whose recent dispatches on Elon Musk’s potential financial engineering are keeping the Twitter board up all night. At the end of the long day, though, I do distinctly remember our C.E.O. Joe Purzycki remarking about how much he desperately wanted to hire one particular journalist who had come by for our pitch: Tara Palmeri.

In a career, timing is everything. And, in many ways, I’d already been trying to work with Tara for years. Back when I started The Hive, in the run up to the Trump era, I devoured her reporting at Politico. Tara, who had spent time both at Page Six and as a founding reporter at Politico Europe, was a master of the high-low mix. She was a ferociously smart and ambitious reporter with a novelist’s eye for detail, and a brilliant sense of humor about Washington, and the various creatures who roamed its terrain: their seriousness, their self-seriousness, their higher calling, and their insurmountable appetite for white glove gossip. I had tried to hire Tara back then, when she covered the Trump administration, but she instead took a job as the White House Correspondent at ABC News. Alas.

Years later, we ran into each other at a book party on the Lower East Side and caught up. I complimented her on all the great work she was doing at ABC. She had all the exuberance of a reporter at the peak of their powers, but I wondered if she missed the influence she’d had as a shit-kicking, news-breaking, must-read journalist. (TV is wonderful, but the cadence and broadness of the medium requires an intellectual liquidation that, at least in my experience, never satisfies true news and information obsessives.) I had one foot out the door already, beginning to dream Puck dreams, and I wondered if my insight was correct.

Soon after I left The Hive to work with TPG, the private equity firm and one of our principal investors at Puck, I took a trip to Washington to begin some of the earliest work on this project. I was information gathering, ideating, and doing all the things one does when they really, deep down, have no earthly idea what they are doing. Naturally, I wanted to get in touch with Tara. I sent her a text from the train on the way down, somewhere due south of Wilmington, and she got right back by the time I arrived in Union Station.

We met for coffee the next afternoon at the Dolcezza, the coffee shop in the City Center, the capitol’s mall metropolis near-but-not-too-near the White House, where a number of Trump aides happened to live. The cluster of restaurants and the proximity to K Street, the agencies, and both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue made for good people-watching. We sat on stools looking out the window, observing the mating rituals of power espoused by the town’s various ruling and aspiring classes. It was a hoot.

That afternoon Tara and I had one of those long talks that writers and editors have—about the work, about the culture, about the people defining the work and the culture, and everything in between. My mentor Graydon Carter used to refer to his long chats with the legendary war correspondent Michael Herr as “ten cigarette calls,” because that’s how many butts they ripped while they aimlessly chatted, all in the pursuit of some elevated editorial vision. People don’t smoke nowadays, and frankly, regrettably, that mindmeld has become largely a goner in our business—replaced by algorithms and dispassionate genetically modified media, and also by a generation that never even knew it existed. But it's a crucial part of the creative process, and even creative management.

Anyway, you get the gist: Tara and I vibed that day. I knew from that coffee chat and voyeuristic catch-up that we saw the Washington landscape, and its many characters, in the same manner. The location of our meeting, in fact, was the perfect metaphor to encapsulate it all. True to its defining architectural centerpiece, D.C. was a mall: pleasant and orderly on the outside, and purely transactional on the inside.

Over the course of the next year or so, Tara and I would meet for lunch and talk on the phone while she was reporting and hosting the sensational podcast, Broken, about Jeffrey Epstein’s downfall. And as Puck was coming into view, I’d always imagined that she was going to be a huge part of it. But timing, as I’ve already conveyed, is everything. As my partners and I were closing our first term sheet, Tara got an offer she couldn’t refuse. I remember watching a text from her pop up onto my phone one equally frigid winter morning asking if we could chat, the polite and careful signal that bad news was on the horizon. Tara was going to Politico to become one of the authors of its vaunted Playbook franchise. I was disappointed but nonetheless thrilled for her.

One of the lessons of the start-up journey is that you have to be both patient and aggressive at oscillating turns, and you can’t let past disappointments interfere with future opportunities. Earlier this spring, Tara and I met for coffee at Morandi, not far from Puck’s charming office on Bank Street, and envisioned a future for her here. We talked about a new kind of newsletter column that would unearth what people in D.C. were really talking about: the privileged information, the dish, the inside conversation, the anxieties, the sotto voce material. It would focus on the people who ran the town on Capitol Hill, on K Street, in the West Wing, and within the media companies that cover it all. We decided, naturally, it had to be called The Washington Mall.

I’m thrilled that Tara will be joining Puck on May 2nd as our senior political correspondent. The Washington Mall will debut in beta form a few weeks later. (Please sign up here.) Imagine a sort of Axios After Dark—sophisticated, news-filled, insightful, delicious. Tara is already gathering incredible material that will define the story of what’s really happening in town. Think of it as a sort of What I’m Hearing…, Matt Belloni’s industry-defining private email, for Washington. We know that Puck’s existing community will love this work; it’s an extension of the insight and proximity that we offer in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the media. We also know that Washington’s biggest players have been waking up to Tara’s name in their inboxes for years, and many of them count sheep at night wondering what’s in her notebook. We’re excited to welcome many of them to our growing community.

Obviously the chance to work with Tara is the thrilling culmination of a years-long quest. But I’m excited about The Washington Mall for other reasons, too. In many ways, Tara follows the entrepreneurial spirit of her playbook predecessors, Mike Allen, the visionary reporter who went on to co-found the mighty Axios, and Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, the indefatigable and enterprising shape-shifters who co-founded Punchbowl News, the next Axios. Tara is a fantastic example of a new wave for our industry: she is helping to transform the very firmament of our craft, the business model, which will create incredible opportunities for those who follow in her footsteps.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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