Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory—our weekly digest of the most fabulous work being produced at Puck.

It was another fantastic week: Tara Palmeri got into the Biden indecision drama; Matt Belloni nailed the Golden Globes’ existential dilemma; Dylan Byers analyzed the latest deck chair moves at CNN; Julia Ioffe spoke with Trump’s top Kremlinologists; and Bill Cohan broke down the S.B.F.-Mooch bromance.

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

WASHINGTON:
Julia Ioffe determines just how close Trump brought us to democratic annihilation.
and…
Tina Nguyen reconsiders the G.O.P.’s “DeSantasy”
and and…
Tara Palmeri chronicles the afterlife of the Trump Hotel D.C.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer breaks the news on Gavin Newsom’s latest political pickle.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni leads a master class in Golden Globes existentialism.
and…
Julia Alexander subscribes to Zaz++.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers investigates the CNN primetime scramble.
and…
Eriq Gardner previews the media’s legal case of the year.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan reports on The Mooch’s crypto fantasies.

PODCASTS:
Peter Hamby and I chat about how Amazon ate the NFL on The Powers That Be.
and…
Matt gets into the press drama about Don’t Worry Darling on The Town.

Yes, also of course, Dylan and I were talking about CNN, a love language that we share with Peter Hamby and many others on Puck’s team. Our fascination with the network is, in a profound way, a tribute to its ubiquitous role, hard-won over decades, as a bastion of credible TV journalism: a platform for conveying accurate real-time information to millions of people desperately in need of it. What do you do when it’s election night, or you hear about a natural disaster, or a horrific (and increasingly quotidian) school shooting? You turn on CNN.

But CNN is also a harbinger of our rapidly transforming media ecosystem—an extraordinary brand still turning around $1 billion in profit, which is nevertheless not immune from secular industrial and technological changes (cord-cutting, streaming, disintermediation) and unforced errors of a different variety (the AT&T debacle). In many ways, CNN reflects the story of our time as the culture moves from linear to digital, cable to direct-to-consumer, Trump to post-Trump to God-only-knows-what’s-next.

At Puck, we study the rumblings at CNN to determine not only how they reverberate across the industry, but also to decipher what is next for all of us. So, yes, it’s a fascination, but of a largely business variety, not an editorially prurient one. Nevertheless, my voice memo response to Dylan read, “Ooh.” Then: “I’ll call you.” He responded, “They’re going to announce at 9 a.m.”

Anyway, at around 8:30 a.m., Dylan hit send on his tweet. Eight minutes later, The L.A. Times published their pre-fab piece featuring an interview with CNN’s C.E.O., Chris Licht. Folks inside CNN often joke that Dylan somehow lurks in their hallways, peers into their Slack channels, and essentially serves as a pro bono H.R. function of their parentco., Warner Baros. Discovery. At times like these, I don’t blame them for wondering how he pulls it all off.

As it so happens, Dylan was also in New York this week. And I had a mighty blast peering over his shoulder all afternoon on Thursday as he rolled calls to get the real inside story behind the move. As you’ll see in Leave It to Tapper, we’ve subtly entered a new era in cable news, and it’s actually a notable departure from the days when network lineups were etched in stone for a decade or so. Tapper will indeed move from CNN’s dayside programming to the evenings, but it’s still an experiment—as are so many of the other moves being tested across the industry.

The media industry I grew up in was decidedly anti-iterative; every plan or piece of content had to be perfectly groomed or chiseled for the moment it was published or broadcast. It was a modus operandi that was elegant and manicured but also ossified, resistant to change, and ultimately vulnerable. Iterative approaches may seem riskier, but they almost always provide the sort of real-time learnings that inevitably evolve the product. In many ways, as Dylan notes, the real story at CNN is what’s taking place off camera, no matter how often they shuffle the lineup. It’s the story of our time, the leitmotif of our very industry, and precisely the sort of piece you can only find at Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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