| Earlier in my career, as a young-ish editor at The New York Times Magazine, I had the pleasure of working with some of the greatest writers and reporters knocking around the hallways of that bastion of journalistic excellence. I used to edit Andrew Sorkin, for instance, and remember fondly combing through the final drafts of his masterful post-Treasury profile of Tim Geithner as he apologetically took off his shoes in my cubicle, revealing conspicuously bright striped socks, as we ran through those final memorable paragraphs of the copy; after all, the poor guy had been on his feet since 4 a.m. taping his show, Squawk Box, on CNBC. It was amazing to see how damn hard the guy worked to achieve his success. A good lesson, to be sure.
In those days, Adam Davidson and I used to compose his columns by first walking around the block, and sharing memories of our childhoods in Greenwich Village. Mark Leibovich needed to crack jokes for 15 minutes before segueing into the work at hand. (I was happy to oblige.) I will always recall the final hours of closing Brian Stelter’s epic cover story on the backstage hijinks of the Today show, as virtually every A-list star in the business called his cell phone to contribute last minute observations and bon mots.
Back in the days before she was a highly sought-after screenwriter, Amy Chozick was the fiercest reporter in the building, and the chief eminence on the Hillary beat. I still chuckle at how we concocted that totally insane Planet Hillary cover (insane enough that it soon acquired its own Twitter handle), and created a galaxy-like sidebar assigning each Clinton ally to an appropriate planet. We laughed and laughed. Doug Band, and others, did not.
During those years, I was able to spread my wings as an editor and learn from some of the best in the business. The topics we covered at the Times were limited only by our own imaginations. And yet I found myself wondering, again and again, how we were missing the story of our time, or at least of our very particular moment in time—that is, the transformation of media. We were, of course, in the earliest innings of the change, and yet so much of the future was becoming remarkably clear. To wit: I recall a prescient piece by Alex French, The Last Disposable Action Hero, about Hollywood’s new trend of discarding the character-driven scripts that dominated its heyday in favor of commercialized I.P. and superhero movies that could be sequel-ized, open to huge box office in China and Brazil, and tap into previously existing fandoms. But that was largely it. And it wasn’t just true of the place I worked. It was a pervasive blindspot.
For generations, as I have certainly extemporized here before, so much in media was set in stone. We all knew what constituted an evening news program, a memoir, a romantic comedy; we read on paper, watched content in 30- or 90-minute installments; movies were consumed out of the home until they were available on VHS and DVD. There was a cultural appreciation for what made Forbes different from Fortune, or Jennings from Rather. And even though, as media makers, we were supposed to be more in touch with consumer demand than almost any other industry, so many harbingers of change—Facebook, the iPhone, 2008, YouTube—were treated like fads that everyone else had to adjust to. Maybe it was all just too meta to comprehend.
Indeed, we were often blind to how effortlessly other industries had embraced their sea shifts. Silicon Valley had inserted supercomputing into every single aspect of our lives, and was looking for more. Some soothsayers in Hollywood were conjuring up the earliest iterations of streaming video. Obama’s campaign evidenced how platforms could blitzscale contributions, advocacy, and a public profile. Wall Street had moved beyond traditional banking to a new universe of alternative investments. Consider that the emerging leveraged buyout business was barely covered by McKinsey and Bain in the early 2000s. Now private equity, a more than $6 trillion dollar industry by some estimates, is the most astonishing wealth creation vehicle in human history. Anyway, change waits for no one.
As dedicated or even semi-dedicated readers of this space will likely recognize, the transformation is hardly too meta for us here at Puck to behold. Indeed, it’s one of our chief leitmotifs and, truly, one of the premises upon which we have built our growing media company. I was reminded of this ever-present phenomenon this week, in particular, through a number of astonishingly good pieces. In The Treaty of Paris, ace media scribe Dylan Byers reported on the uncomfortable friction between Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and a history-bending legend of both fashion and media, and Edward Enninful, a legend-in-the-making and her likely successor. But the piece is less about personalities than it is about the existential conundrum of managing succession in a fraying medium, or choosing between stewarding a legacy icon versus creating the new canvas.
Meanwhile, in The Ghost of William F. Buckley, Tina Nguyen checked in on The Dispatch, the disruptive direct-to-consumer heir to The National Review. It’s a fascinating conversation about partisan politics and platforms, but it also delves into how emerging business models are fueling new forms of non-Fox-News-shouting dialogue between journalists and consumers.
But if you only read one piece, I implore you to check out Julia Alexander’s devilishly brilliant story, Hollywood’s Feel-Good Horror Story. Julia, a Puck star and director of strategy at Parrot, the in-demand streaming analytics company, elegantly explains why mediacos have become so obsessed with horror, an inexpensive genre that can still command theatrical and yet leads to consumption and retention on streaming. Perhaps even more compellingly, Julia evidences how we’re still only learning how to truly imbibe all our streaming data. For me, it’s fascinating and pleasantly meta to watch an industry adapt and advance its interests in real time, with humility. After all, it’s the story of our time, and precisely the sort of piece that you can only find at Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
