Good morning,

It’s Jon Kelly, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Puck. Happy Saturday. As usual, here is some of the most memorable work that you might have missed during another sensational week at Puck. And stick around, below the fold, for the backstory on how it came together.

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HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni reveals why Disney’s Marvel Miracle is ending.

MEDIA:

Dylan Byers explains the corporate vulcan chess behind the Chris Cuomo replacement saga.

WASHINGTON:

Julia Ioffe unspools Biden’s beef with Putin.

SILICON VALLEY:

Teddy Schleifer previews MacKenzie Scott’s latest power move to throw some shade on her ex.

WALL STREET:

If you still haven’t read Bill Cohan’s piece on Carlos Watson’s latest antics, rectify that immediately.

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This month, Bradley Tusk is hosting a special year-end series on the biggest technology and policy changes taking hold of key sectors of the economy. Each episode Bradley interviews a leading expert to discuss the pandemic's impact on each industry and offer predictions for 2022 and beyond. Bradley addresses the biggest policy changes ahead and how to balance innovation and regulation in crypto, digital health, autonomous vehicles, media, gaming, and climate.

Back in 2013, a lifetime ago in media, I was an editor at The New York Times Magazine. It was an historic brand and I loved contributing to the sort of place that had meant so much in the culture. Like most people who worked at the Times, I had grown up in a household that revered the joint. My parents are writers, and the Sunday paper was a touchstone of my upbringing. Who got the cover of the Book Review was a weekly conversation. Janet Maslin and Bill Safire were looming figures in our conversations. When the Yankees traded for the slugger Paul O’Neill, my parents thought it was notable only in that he was the brother of the paper of record’s food writer. 

The greatest perk of working at the Times, of course, was the influence of the audience. We knew that the White House was reading Nate Silver’s analysis of how Romney could defeat Obama–and that they would factor Nate’s arguments into account in order to make sure he didn’t. You could also be sure that Wall Street C.E.O.s devoured our investigation into the London Whale, or (more likely) poured a double Oban 18 before reading Tim Geithner’s first post-’08 tell-all. But one of my favorite stories from that era was a saga about the decline of morning television written by a young media reporter named Brian Stelter. 

Nowadays, Brian is an afterhours newsletter kingpin and Sunday show host at CNN. But back then he was a young reporter with a carnivorous obsession with TV news and the culture that underpinned it.

At the time, Brian had a book coming out about NBC’s then-recent mess at Today, which surrounded Ann Curry’s unceremonious exodus. But after talking about the book with Brian, it was clear that the beef between Curry and a then-ascendant Matt Lauer was merely the most present drama in a much-larger Boschian painting of feuding egos, warring personalities, and over-pampered thin-skinned stars and executives, alike. The real tectonic plate-level drama was existential and secular. For generations, tens of millions of Americans woke up and turned on the tube to one of three channels to collect their warmed-over news as they stirred their coffee and toasted their Pop Tarts. By the early aughts, though, the mobile phone was going to tear that behavior asunder. 

Innovations like Mike Allen’s Playbook (another great Times Magazine read from the era) were beginning to prove that consumers wanted the news to come to them, not the other way around, not only before they even turned on the TV, but also before they even brushed their teeth. And this change, it was clear, was going to bring with it a lot of disruption. New businesses would rise, others would falter, and there was likely to be a whole lot of bad behavior in the process. (No, I’m not referring to the behavior that would lead to Lauer’s downfall. That’s a whole other matter and a different magnitude of catastrophe.)

The afternoon we closed Brian’s story was one of the most memorable in my Times career. The resulting piece was dishy, dense, funny, and frightening. What I remember most, however, was watching Brian’s iPhone ring and ring as we tried to close the piece, beside two fact-checkers, with notes from top editors and lawyers, in a sixth floor conference room, the smell of Wolfgang’s fried potato chips and generous Manhattans wafting from below. For the better part of an hour, TV stars and executives called Stelter to clarify details, argue their case, pump their chest, and just dish. It was a feat to behold.

Sometime later, I remember pitching Brian on a story that I was deeply fascinated by. Jeff Zucker, the former daytime E.P. who helped turn Today into a pre-dawn hegemon and eventually ascended the greasy pole to run all of NBCUniversal, had been recruited to run CNN. From the outset, it seemed almost like the beginning of a Nora Ephron movie: a star, perhaps faded by the post-wunderkind blues, had been enlisted to revive a similarly once-great backwater. Sure, Ted Turner had changed the media landscape forever with the introduction of CNN in 1980. But by the time Zucker showed up, it was the province of Eliot Spitzer, Piers Morgan, and re-airs of its primetime shows in prime time. Lou Dobbs’ return to Moneyline had been treated like the second coming of Christ.

What I loved most about my time at the Times was the opportunity to flex different creative muscles and work on all kinds of different stories. But it was also clear to me, even then, that we were missing the biggest story in our own backyard: the transformation of the media. When I checked in with Brian in late 2013 about whether he might be interested in a piece on what Zucker was trying to do at CNN, whether it could work, and what the act itself suggested about the larger convulsions in our industry, he told me that he had to pass. Turned out he was taking a job there himself to experience it all first-hand.

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I thought about that time a bit this week amid the news of Chris Cuomo’s firing from CNN, last weekend, and the attendant and ongoing drama surrounding the vacancy at 9 p.m. Understandably, so much of the industry chatter has centered on the details of the departure, and who will replace Cuomo in primetime–an undeniably fascinating topic that has certainly interested us a fair bit at Puck, too. But, as was the case with Ann Curry a decade ago, the scandal right in front of our eyes obscures the far larger drama in the background. A decade ago, the preponderance of mobile technology marooned TV news. Now, the onslaught of streaming presents an even more significant challenge, and opportunity. Zucker’s decision on Cuomo’s replacement, just like Jeff Shell’s post-Maddow personnel moves, will help define a new age. Perhaps it’s of little surprise, then, that a number of well-placed TV executives have suggested, only two-thirds jokingly, to Dylan Byers that both should try to hire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to fill 9 p.m. Is hiring A.O.C. both fanciful and absurd? Of course, but ridiculous ideas are usually leading indicators of industrial sea change.

If you really want to know the various considerations underlying these multi-billion decisions, I’d highly recommend reading Dylan’s piece, Notes on the Cuomo Scandal, about the three-dimensional considerations at play. It’s a good example of the sophisticated (and, sure, occasionally dishy) journalism that you can only find here. And I suggest that you read it alongside another incredible selection of work this week, such as Julia Ioffe’s expert tea-leaf reading of Putin and Biden’s confab, Teddy Schleifer’s insight into MacKenzie Scott’s new empire, and Bill Cohan’s piece on the “Axeman” of Wall street.

Cable news isn’t just a pet fancy of my own. Indeed, it’s one of the last analog bastions of culture to shift to a pure-play digital ecosystem. Music distribution has evolved from the album to Napster and then Pandora, and finally Spotify, which appears to be the endstate in the journey, at least for now. What will the end state look like in streaming news? Will it be six hours of live, and often undifferentiated, content broadcast back-to-back? Certainly not. But the truth is that no one quite knows. It’s one of the many dramas that makes our culture and industry’s digital acceleration scary but also exciting. And yes, there’s sure to be some bad behavior along the way.

Have a great weekend,

Jon

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