Good morning,
Happy Saturday and welcome back to The Backstory. It was another incredible week here at Puck, defined largely by Julia Ioffe’s extraordinary, Orwellian work on Putin’s self-made war in Ukraine; Dylan Byers’ amazing scoopage on the drama surrounding CNN; Matt Belloni’s reportage on the latest #MeToo development in Hollywood; and Teddy Schleifer’s examination of Silicon Valley’s high-flying moneymen.
Check out some of our very best work, below, and as always, stick around for the backstory on how it came together.
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WASHINGTON: Julia Ioffe dissects how Putin’s war has become Europe’s 9/11. And… Eriq Gardner scoops what Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court appointment might mean for Hollywood.
MEDIA: Dylan Byers gets the early dish on the dawn of the Chris Licht era at CNN. And… Offers the latest kibble on Ben & Justin Smith’s new project.
HOLLYWOOD: Matt Belloni scoops the latest front in Hollywood’s #MeToo war.
SILICON VALLEY: Teddy Schleifer gets into Yuri Milner’s cap table.
WALL STREET: William D. Cohan examines whether Barry McCarthy can flip Peloton.
THE POWERS THAT BE: Get the real inside story from our all-star team 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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Money. Romance. Tragedy. Deception. Hulu’s limited series “The Dropout,” the story of Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Theranos, is an unbelievable tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. How did the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire lose it all in the blink of an eye?
A New CNN & Europe’s 9/11
News happens all the time, and often unpredictably. Riding shotgun with Puck’s authors amid high-octane breaking news environments is, indeed, one of the rewards of my job, even if it occasionally drives my family nuts. I’ll give you a recent example.
Last Friday afternoon, Puck’s executive editor Ben Landy and I were on the phone with Dylan Byers, our prolific and intrepid media reporter. Dylan has been all over the news of CNN’s internal angst and turmoil amid Jeff Zucker’s surprise departure, reporting on the agonies and grievances of his loyalists inside CNN, in particular. On this afternoon, Dylan was preparing a freshly reported piece revealing the names of the latest round of potential successors, and we were talking it all through in real time. On the call, Dylan mentioned that he’d just gotten a meaningful tip suggesting that Chris Licht, the executive producer of Late Night with Stephen Colbert, had emerged as a serious contender.
Licht’s name made sense in this conversation: the guy had been a prodigious news producer, standing up Morning Joe in its infancy before turning around CBS’ This Morning and course-correcting Colbert after a rocky start. He also had a longstanding relationship with David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of the soon-to-be-consummated Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s forthcoming parentco. I don’t know Licht, but he seemed to possess the sort of press-shy workaholic character that had made Zaslav so successful during his decade or so turning Discovery into a scandal-free, egoless media behemoth. Dylan said he’d be monitoring the situation. The call broke, and everyone wished each other a nice weekend.
But reporting never quite works that way. After getting home from dinner with my family at a local restaurant, I noticed a cavalcade of texts from Dylan. He’d connected with a source who had told him that Licht was going to replace Zucker. Dylan was working the phones ferociously to get the detail confirmed. We agreed to chat in the morning.
By the time I started fluttering my eyes shortly after six a.m., I reached for my phone and saw that Dylan had already begun working on his story. I immediately hastened to my laptop in the study, off the bedroom, and began editing the piece. I assumed I had a few hours before Dylan, who lives in L.A., was going to be up and at ‘em. And yet, as I was going through the piece, adding some exposition and inserting a few questions for him to address, I could see his active cursor blinking. Dylan was pulling another all-nighter, fiercely in pursuit of breaking the story. He knew that he had the goods, and he didn’t want to let another reporter beat him to the punch.
I ran downstairs, made some french toast and handed my kids the iPad—Cocomelon, Shaun the Sheep, the usual—and apologized to my wife, letting her know that I was about to disappear for a few hours, leaving her with a couple boys fully wound up on sugar and cartoons. I went back to my laptop to collaborate, with Dylan and Ben, on the final draft of the story. My god, there is no more exciting feeling than the one that tingles your fingers when you know you’re publishing information that moves the market, that everyone will devour. It’s a lovely way to begin the day.
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Dylan’s extraordinary work on the Zucker beat helped make February an extraordinary month for Puck. So, too, did the heroic work of Julia Ioffe on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As I wrote last week, Julia isn’t just a colleague: She’s a journalist that I’ve admired for decades, and a friend. Her tireless work these past few weeks has also elevated her into something else, too: a legit national treasure. Her narration of this horrific war has been a public service during these past few weeks. As The Washington Post’s fantastic media reporter Sarah Ellison noted the other day on Twitter, Julia has always been a brilliant talent, but now she is indispensable. I couldn’t agree more.
If you have time to read only one piece this week, I deeply urge you to click on Julia’s latest dispatch, Europe’s 9/11, which deftly elucidates the grim existential factors at play here while gracefully dispensing with the falsehoods and hollow fictions. It’s a perfect example of the sort of journalism that you can only find here at Puck.
Have a great weekend, Jon 
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