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 Good morning,
Happy Saturday and welcome back to the Backstory—your weekend capsule of the best work that we are publishing at Puck.
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MEDIA: Dylan Byers exclusively reports on the latest shoe to drop in the Zucker saga.
Eriq Gardner makes his Puck debut with the case of the Hockey Mom vs. The Gray Lady.
HOLLYWOOD: Matt Belloni reveals the merger intrigue that every agent in town is talking about.
WASHINGTON: Julia Ioffe examines Putin’s Hamlet complex. And… Tina Nguyen chronicles the Trump sidekick rehab tour.
WALL STREET: Baratunde Thurston explains crypto’s colorblind promise. And… Bill Cohan goes deep on Goldman’s M&A insecurity complex.
SILICON VALLEY: Teddy Schleifer reports on who has more D.C. juice: Laurene vs. Thiel.
THE POWERS THAT BE: Get the real inside story on the Zucker scandal from Peter Hamby, Matt, and Dylan on the latest episode of The Powers that Be.
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Scenes from a Media Meltdown
Every day at 11 a.m. eastern, I join my co-founders Joe Purzycki, Max Tcheyan, and Liz Gough for a quick catch-up on Puck’s business affairs. Ideally, we try to convene at Puck’s headquarters, a charming parlor apartment on a tree-lined street in Greenwich Village, a block away from The Waverly Inn. More recently, though, and like everyone else, we’ve succumbed to meeting over Zoom, looking forward to the day when this Omicron wave finally, irreversibly passes.
Generally, we go around the Brady Bunch-style Zoom box with open items that require sharing or strategizing—flagging marketing observations, detailing new sales prospects, or discussing how to fix pesky bugs in the sign-up flow. We’ll talk about open headcounts, cash flow analysis, and the latest data on our customer acquisition cost-to-lifetime value ratio. Puck has only been in the market for four and half months, and these meetings are as jam-packed as they are spirited. There is a lot to do before everyone breaks to move on with their day.
On Wednesday morning, we were just getting started when I noticed a flurry of activity on both my phone and laptop screen—Slack alerts, tweets, and then a preponderance of texts. Stunningly, CNN president Jeff Zucker had announced his resignation from the network, effective immediately. Ostensibly, we were discussing a couple key business initiatives and exciting new products over Zoom—more on those a little later—but my mind started to drift to Zucker and the implications… his outsized stature at the brand, CNN’s importance to Discovery’s merger with the WarnerMedia assets, and what the leadership vacuum might mean in a rapidly transforming industry. After a few minutes, I excused myself and started working the phones with our team to find out what was really going on.
Zucker, in many ways, is a cultural Zelig of our time. A former wunderkind executive producer of Today, who was running the show by his late-20s, he climbed the ranks to eventually become the C.E.O. of NBCUniversal by his early 40s. His singular vision resurrected CNN, which had become a sleepy backwater for self-serious gabfest quasi-journalism, and quickly gave it a shot in the arm and then some.
The commercial success of Zucker’s era is often reduced to an equation of breathless coverage of tropical weather, missing aircraft, Trump, and the poop cruise, but he unquestionably challenged the network to reach a new octave in its coverage and ambitions. By the end of the Trump administration, CNN was earning about $1.7 billion in total revenue—a staggering sum for a cable news network in the cord-cutting era.
Part of Zucker’s appeal came from his own personal and professional oscillations. He had achieved so much, and so young, and yet it hadn’t always been effortless. Zucker’s tenure atop NBCU, the conglomerate, was decidedly less successful than his earlier years climbing the ladder at NBC, the network. By the time he got to the executive suite, NBC was in the gutter, still trying to rediscover its mojo after its roaring Must See TV success of the late 90s, when Friends and Seinfeld reigned supreme. After Comcast bid to acquire the company—a fascinating story, by the way, magnificently told by our Bill Cohan—rumors swirled constantly about Zucker’s ouster.
After he preemptively resigned, he tried to reprise his early glory days on Today with Katie Couric via her syndicated show, Katie, which only lasted about two years. Moreover, the guy has suffered two bouts of cancer and survived an open heart surgery. I remember once listening to him talk on a podcast about competing for the first singles spot on his high school tennis team. Zucker is unmoved by the challenges that would vanquish others.
In some ways, the CNN job seemed the perfect fit. Zucker’s ascent at NBC had been paved by his unwavering attention to the most microscopic television arts—a laser focus that he tried, not always successfully, to transcend as his responsibilities scaled. But whereas you can’t micromanage an entire global media company of NBCU’s stature, Zucker’ prodigious talents and experience allowed him to run CNN, a division of a conglomerate, like a fiefdom. As anyone who has worked there will tell you, he was intimately involved in everything from writing the chyron copy to unsolicited show notes. He elevated some talents (Don Lemon), helped create others (Kaitlan Collins), and recruited with the best of them (Jake Tapper; more recently Eva Longoria for CNN+).
Like anyone who gets paid to do something that they are both passionate about and incredibly talented at, he also seemed to love it. In the process, Zucker developed an O captain! My captain!-ish, Dead Poets Society connection with his talent and rank-and-file staffers, alike.
Again, Zucker’s tenure at the network wasn’t blameless. Perhaps befitting for the guy who created The Apprentice, he seemed to take Donald Trump’s candidacy too frivolously well into 2016—as an entertainment stunt rather than an anti-democracy Trojan Horse—which inevitably bestowed credibility upon the candidate and elevated his electoral profile. CNN wasn’t the only force in the media that often treated Trump’s rallies like roaring televised concert tours, but it went further than others, and often defended itself hollowly as simply covering the news.
But Zucker was smart, and he knew how to out-pivot the criticism. After Trump’s election, CNN leaned heavily into a combative and #resistance-friendly style of journalism that seemed to defensively erase from memory any participation it had offered in Trump’s ascent. It was a tricky gamble, as the strategy alienated Republicans and centrists, alike. Even Jim Accosta’s oafish and confrontational grandstanding in the briefing room was journalistically unfullfing to many viewers on the left who didn’t buy the stunt. Nevertheless, the gamble worked and CNN’s brand reached an iconic stature in the culture. Ratings soared to unimaginable levels and its P&L blossomed, creating a sort of unprecedented economic mirage. By the last few years of the past decade, television news was headed for the sort of financial model supernova that had upended both the music industry and publishing, among other talent-driven sectors. And yet the money was rolling in as never before.
Of course, the success was ephemeral for all the predictable reasons. Trump’s electoral loss and deplatforming, coupled with late-stage Covid news exhaustion, minimized ratings as the streaming era beckoned. After Trump, however, Zucker was able to pivot the network once again—this time even more masterfully than before—toward the center, as if the last four years had never happened. It was wise execution, in no small part because John Malone, the cable industry titan, and board member of Discovery Communications, which was preparing to acquire and integrate the WarnerMedia assets, had stated firmly and openly his editorial and strategic preference for a more down-the-middle approach to streaming news. Zucker, who had survived health scares and attempted corporate putschs, now appeared poised to join future Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav’s inner circle. Or at least that was how it seemed by Wednesday morning.
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Shortly after I exited our Zoom, I connected with Dylan Byers, Puck’s peerless media reporter. Not only has Dylan been covering Zucker for the better part of his career, he’s also spent years working for him. It was shortly after 8 a.m. in L.A., where Dylan lives, but his phone was already ringing off the hook with insights and dish from executives throughout the business. He needed the time to cobble more reporting together to make sense of the stunning news. We decided we’d check in later.
We traded phone calls all afternoon as, inevitably, Dylan needed to drop me to clear time for a source call. By the time he was finally freed up to check in, I was driving my older son, who is 8-years-old, to his basketball practice. As the call came in, I told my son politely that I really needed to pick up, and I’d make it up to him later. He consented—families are the hidden heroes of the start-up journey—and picked up a Lego magazine to bide his time.
When I accepted Dylan’s phone call, it was clear that he was getting the goods. He launched right into his reporting, reading from his notes what he’d been gathering, and occasionally reading the entire quotes at length. The raw energy of a reporter on the case is a miraculous thing to behold, and I didn’t want to slow Dylan down to let him know that one of my kids was in the car since he was so singularly focused on the job at hand.
I’ll admit that I will occasionally and mistakenly drop an uncouth swear word around my kids, which earns me a $1 fine around my house. (They have the stuffed piggy banks to prove it.) So they’ve heard a thing or two before in that department. But TV people speak in their own head-spinningly Reservoir Dogs-syle lingua franca, in which f-bombs are merely the prefix to any adjective. As Dylan read from his notebook, I inspected the overheard mirror to watch my 8-year-old’s eyes widen and his mouth grow agape. I knew I was creating a memory for life. All I could do was laugh, and ask him to be quiet so that the adults could talk.
Dylan filed his first dispatch that evening, and it was fabulous: an artful, insiderly reported analysis of the players, the stakes, the fears, and the earliest signs of what was to come next. It ended with a fantastic reportorial nugget. Jason Kilar, the presumably outgoing C.E.O. of WarnerMedia, had just visited the CNN newsrooms in New York and D.C. to try to placate the grieving and vexed staffers.
But right before we published Dylan’s fantastic piece, Notes on the Zucker Scandal, he sent me a text saying that he had just obtained that audio of Kilar’s visit to Washington, and it was apparently a doozy. Rather than sleep, he was going to transcribe it overnight and file something to me by the time I woke up. Indeed, true to his word, Dylan sent over an excellent draft of what would become his second dispatch in twelve hours, Inside the CNN Newsroom’s Clash with Jason Kilar. When I messaged him and our executive editor, Ben Landy, a couple quick notes at 6:39 a.m. eastern, Dylan got back in a nanosecond—even though it was 3:49 a.m. in L.A. He didn’t want to miss anything.
In all, Dylan produced four pieces of extraordinary reporting this week, which brought Puck community members deep into this defining event. Indeed, Zucker isn’t only a Zelig, he’s also a natural Puck character, whose tentacles extend deeply into all of our power corners. And it’s unlikely he’ll be disappearing from our world soon. I suspect that he’ll have a ripe third act to plot at a streamer, in private equity, or elsewhere. It’s a topic we’ll be following closely. In fact, the story may just be starting.
Have a great weekend, Jon
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