Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room, my twice-weekly private email on media and media people. Tout and shout of the week goes to my dear friend and partner Lauren Sherman, whose very dishy reporting on the fashion beat has so enraged the debonair LVMH chief executive Bernard Arnault that he tried to ban his managers from speaking to Puck, along with a few other media organizations. (Nearly every major French newsco has signed a letter protesting his effort.) Lauren’s Line Sheet is, indeed, the email Monsieur Arnault does not want you to read. Go ahead and sign up here.

Tonight, in this email, more news on the “demure” R.F.K. Jr.-Olivia Nuzzi sexting saga that continues to enrapture the slum-dwelling media elite. Who did what? Who knew what, when? What did Ryan know? Who leaked? And, of course, what will happen to New York’s star political journalist?

But first…

• A new Forbes C.E.O.?: Charles Koch’s private equity entity and Indian media entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia are in talks to acquire Forbes in a deal that would value the mediaco at around $570 million, according to Axios’s Sara Fischer. Of course, as I noted earlier this year, Forbes is really three different businesses: the once-illustrious media asset, now known only for ranking the world’s billionaires; a profitable events and licensing arm; and a financial advisory service and e-commerce site, which is where the growth happens and the real money gets made. Imagine NerdWallet plus Wirecutter plus brand extensions—but with the imprimatur of a legacy media brand once synonymous with noblesse oblige.

  In any event, I’m told that Troy Young, the former Hearst Magazines president who now serves as a strategic advisor and board member to startups (and occasional media ruminator on his very thoughtful People vs. Algorithms pod), is being positioned to run the entire Forbes empire after the acquisition. For the past three years, Troy has served on the board of the aforementioned financial advisory service, Forbes Advisor, and e-commerce site, Forbes Marketplace, where the margins are. “Troy is the kingmaker here,” one source with knowledge of the deal negotiations said.

  As Sara notes, the target valuation is high given the current marketplace for media deals. But since Forbes LLC only owns 40 percent of the marketplace business, the deal also needs to provide meaningful liquidity for the rest of its investors. We’ll see how that shakes out.

• Zucker’s game, cont’d: Jeff Zucker’s RedBird IMI has made its sixth acquisition: the nonfiction production company Efran Films Canada, which will now rebrand as Bright North Studios. The RedBird IMI suite now features several production firms, including All3Media, Media Res, and EverWonder Studio. So Zucker has built up a meaningful portfolio of production assets and assembled them far more efficiently and less flagrantly than Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs’ Candle Media. But I still can’t shake the feeling that Zucker, an operator rather than investor by temperament, would at least be tempted by an invitation from David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale to run CBS under soon-to-be Paramount chief Jeff Shell. (Whether Shell wants a potential successor inside the hen house is another question, of course, but that’s what the money is for.) Of course, Zucker probably isn’t interested in merely managing a legacy asset through decline, so it would depend on the new parentco’s priorities and ambitions.
• Boar on the Glor: On that note, Paramount this week initiated the second phase of its layoff plan, which is targeting 2,000 positions (or 15 percent of staff) in order to shave $500 million off the balance sheet ahead of the Skydance merger. Paramount+ was especially hard hit, as was the comms division. The most notable casualty on the news side was former CBS Evening News anchor Jeff Glor, who was muscled out of Cronkite’s former chair by Norah O’Donnell in 2019 and relegated to Saturday mornings. Of course, O’Donnell herself is now being very elegantly pushed aside to make way for a forgettable and less expensive cast of rotating co-anchors. (Closer by committee, as my partner John Ourand might put it.) So continues the industry’s long slide toward irrelevance. On second thought, would Zucker even want this?
• The Arc of history: Washington Post chief executive Will Lewis, who famously survived a professional death scare over the summer, this week laid off 54 employees, or 25 percent, of Arc XP, the money-hemorrhaging SaaS business that the paper first stood up in 2015. The Post has tried on various occasions to sell Arc XP, to no avail, and there’s some question as to why Lewis didn’t just shut the whole thing down—or at least dismantle it further. Remember, he’s still trying to claw the paper back from nearly $100 million in annual losses (or $77 million after buyouts). Instead, the division will now focus on utilizing A.I. tools for its customers, including introducing automated consultation to help onboard clients.
• W.T.F.? dept.: On a related note, the Post’s own coverage of the Arc layoffs now features this mind-boggling correction before the article: “A previous version of this article incorrectly said that The Washington Post reduced its newsroom workforce by 240 people via buyouts and layoffs. The reductions took place across the company, not just in the newsroom, and were buyouts only, not layoffs. The article also referred to Will Lewis as the executive editor of The Post. He is the publisher and chief executive. In addition, the article misspelled the last name of Post spokesperson Olivia Petersen. The article has been corrected.” 🤦‍♂️

And now, on to the main event…

Quixotic as it may have been, Leung’s email seemed to emphasize several points. First, Vox Media was intent on containing the fallout from the scandal while a third party reviewed the matter. To their credit, they have so far done all right on this front: Nuzzi is staying mum and, despite the inevitable torrent of rumors and speculation and attempts to advance the story, the juice is not so easily squeezed from this particular apple. The New York Post, I’m told, is pursuing an unfounded tip that Lizza contacted Kennedy; the Daily Mail ran a full article about a “no comment” from Lizza’s ex-wife; and, most gratingly and pathetically, Keith Olbermann rushed to remind everyone that he once had a relationship with Nuzzi, too. (Keith, come on, grow up.) Alas, a story already devoid of heroes has now expanded its cast.

At the same time, the email underscored the enduring mystery around this story, the questions still unanswered. Foremost among them: What was the true nature of Nuzzi and Kennedy’s relationship? Multiple sources attest that this emotional tryst went both ways, despite the Kennedy camp’s attempt to portray Nuzzi as the aggressor. Over the weekend, the lifestyle blogger turned Kennedy campaign insider Jessica Reed Kraus alleged that Kennedy had repeatedly blocked Nuzzi’s number only to be inundated with nude photos whenever he let her back in. Gavin de Becker, the security specialist who is now “investigating” the matter on Kennedy’s behalf, told Kraus: “This had nothing to do with romance. He was being chased by porn.” Of course, the argument was undermined somewhat by Kraus’s note that Kennedy found the photos “difficult to resist.”

The provenance of this leak remains a preoccupation, as well. On September 15, four days before Oliver Darcy broke the news, I received an encrypted email from an anonymous source suggesting that I “poke around about olivia nuzzi and RFK. Ask NYMAG.” Semafor’s Ben Smith reported receiving a similar email the following Wednesday. Obviously, someone was trying to push media reporters to uncover the story. You could fill all the cocktail bars in Shaw with journalists who suspect that Lizza himself was behind that leak, but there’s actually zero substantive evidence yet to demonstrate as much—just accumulated animosity for a guy who has rubbed some people the wrong way during his career. Meanwhile, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Kennedy had been vocal with friends and associates about the relationship with Nuzzi. Perhaps the law of parsimony applies here, too. Anyway, this thing was destined to leak one way or another, and it’s possible that no one involved fully comprehended its media blast radius.

Meanwhile, Haskell is on the record in his note to staff saying that Nuzzi “violated our policies and potentially damaged our readers’ trust.” Vox is now waiting for the third-party review to determine whether her work contained any evidence of bias or undue influence, but, as I noted last week, her public statements on Kennedy and her reporting on Biden for the magazine already seem to present an obvious and indisputable conflict of interest. Anyway, I’ll leave questions about ethics in journalism to others. (When reached for comment, Haskell referred me to New York P.R. chief Lauren Starke, who declined to answer questions about the timeline of events or the review.) As Leung’s note suggested, this is all up to the lawyers now, and it sure seems like New York has the leverage.

Beneath the superficial weirdness and general creepiness of all this, this sordid episode has turned many in the industry into armchair psychologists—pathologizing Nuzzi’s thing for older men, wondering if she has torched her career for good, and second-guessing how she will pay for her legal defense if Kennedy moves forward, assisted by de Becker. Amateur media historians, of course, will remember de Becker’s cameo during Jeff Bezos’s own personal photo kerfuffle a few years back, which touches on another sad truth in all of this: Selfie sagas are both increasingly common and, for very rich men, pretty survivable. One sincerely hopes that all these unlicensed shrinks in their rowhouses will stop sharpening their swords and remember how truly humiliating this must be for the lone woman involved.

Indeed, Nuzzi has a cascading set of personal and professional challenges to sift through, and plenty that are intertwined. Since 2016, she and Lizza have had a million-dollar-plus book deal with Simon & Schuster for a political tome that kept getting kicked down the road. Despite yet another pervasive rumor floating around out there, Nuzzi still has an agreement with Simon & Schuster for a book, with deal terms likely to be renegotiated now that she and Lizza obviously no longer intend to be co-authors. Presumably, that book will be about a lot more than politics.