Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory—our weekly digest of the best work at Puck.

It was another incredible week—Tara Palmeri penetrated the juiciest Trumpworld dish; Dylan Byers broke the news on an Axios alternate history; Eriq Gardner scooped the lawsuit that’s roiling Hollywood; Matt Belloni unveiled the next phase of the Zaz conquest; William D. Cohan had the news on the biggest finance scandal in D.C.; and Baratunde Thurston and Tina Nguyen broke the fourth wall on the G.O.P.’s pivot.

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.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer reveals the financial colossus at the heart of the Sergey Brin-Nicole Shanahan divorce.
and…
Eriq Gardner breaks the news on a mind-boggling Netflix suit.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni has the skinny on David Zaslav’s next phase of layoffs.
and…
Matt also interviews the star talent behind Hulu’s The Dropout.
and and…
Julia Alexander decodes the Zaz streaming strategy.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan gets the inside story on the real financial crisis in D.C.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers breaks news about the Axios sale, and puts Semafor in perspective.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri gathers the fears coming from Mar-a-Lago.
and…
Julia Ioffe has the Deep State’s sotto voce conversation about the raid.
and and…
Tina Nguyen and Baratunde Thurston get into the reality of January 6 vs modern memory.

PODCASTS:
Peter Hamby and I discuss Warner Bros. Discovery’s woes on The Powers That Be.
and…
Matt and cable legend Tom Rogers discuss post-peak TV on The Town.

Allen’s network and work ethic were legendary. And his ace reporting techniques truly laid bare the most interesting, behind the scenes sausage-making that real Washington insiders craved, and that outsiders found more compelling than the anodyne pool reports. Allen and I had been introduced some time earlier by a close mutual friend, and we’d become fast pals, bonding over, honestly, a mutual curiosity about media conventions and where the business was headed.

VandeHei, on the other hand, was less well known to me. Certainly I was aware of his reputation as a visionary force of nature. Earlier in his career, as a reporter at The Washington Post, he had sensed the institutional lethargy of the joint. And rather than submit to it, he set out to create a disruptor in Politico. It’s easy to forget now, but before Jeff Bezos rescued the paper, the Post had downgraded its ambitions from a national media organization of esteemed prominence to a local outlet. The aura of Ben Bradlee was no longer recognizable by the Marcus Brauchli era. And VandeHei and Allen, along with John Harris, knew there was a better way to run a journalism business. Politico, in its earliest iteration, was as much an expression of confectionary political coverage as it was a rejection of the convention-laden complacency that preceded it. And, in Jim, it was run by a person who had migrated from the newsroom side of the business to become the C.E.O., an unusual journey but a mission-critical transcendence: itself a career path innovation in an industry desperately in need of one.

At the time of our lunch, he and Allen had left behind what they’d created at Politico for their newest pursuit, a start-up that would later be called Axios. We sat that morning around a corner table at The Odeon, watching the Rockwellian pastimes of post-dawn Tribeca—well-heeled financiers in their Gucci loafers and Hermes ties; power stay-at-homers pushing their Nuna strollers; chic creatives in Yeezys; smartly dressed teenagers heading to Stuyvesant.

Axios was different. First and foremost, the company was premised on a format innovation that elegantly surfaced erudite and efficient and highly digestible news, largely via email, the preferred social media platform of the chattering classes. It was clear, too, that VandeHei’s experience running Politico had shown him that the Beltway advertising market was eons larger than anyone else fathomed. And that advertisers were willing to pay a premium to connect with influential audiences in the safe space of an inbox, particularly if that setting could be productized around a particular topic or time.

During the morning of our breakfast, just as Jim and Mike were preparing to launch Axios, I was embarking on my own professional journey. A week later, I’d launch a business for Vanity Fair called The Hive. And during the intervening years, as The Hive took off, I remained both an avid consumer and eager spectator of Axios’s ascent—its content, of course, but also its operations. Axios always maintained its editorial integrity, obviously, but it was run as a business. Journalists had equity and were focused on performance and outcomes. Management addressed their observations and feedback transparently at weekly meetings. The preceding sentences are not as customary as they might seem. For generations, news businesses have told reporters to only think about their work product, and that any knowledge about the finances or strategy of the company could present some verboten conflict of interest.

I always found that perspective to be patronizing, and led to miscommunication. Few understand the nuances of the news business better than its elite practitioners, the ones on the front lines, who create the product that consumers are paying for. And Axios seemed like a rebuttal of that old world philosophy; after all, it was a business run by financially circumspect journalists. So when I left The Hive to begin the earliest work on Puck, the first thing I did was hop on another train, the Acela, and head down to Arlington to meet with Jim and Mike. Generously, they shared their entrepreneurial story. Of course, we remain journalistically objective—Dylan Byers has a sharp piece about Axios this week, and Axios has certainly covered Puck’s growth—but we’re also business leaders trying to create new sustainable models in an industry often uncomfortable with change.

Earlier this week, news broke that Axios has agreed to sell itself to Cox for $525 million, a tidy sum for a transaction in digital media. The deal is a validation, naturally, of the success that Jim, Mike, and Roy have created. But it’s also a validation of the entrepreneurial and enterprising work being done right now in the journalism business. A decade ago, a massively talented Wall Street Journal reporter named Jessica Lessin left the paper to start a subscription news business called The Information. More than a few peers and competitors doubted her. All these years later, however, The Information is an inimitable cultural force, and a clarion to others—a first mover that still serves as the pace car. Punchbowl News, the indispensable Capitol Hill media company, is also run by the journalists Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer, and John Bresnahan. So is Semafor, the hotly anticipated project from The Smiths. And, of course, at Puck, our journalists aren’t simply exquisite writers and reporters; they are our founding partners, commemorated on our cap table, and the best business partners I could ever ask for. When Jim VandeHei made the pivot from the newsroom to the C-suite, it seemed head-scratchingly bizarre. Now, it’s commonplace, and the industry is all the healthier for it.

Have a great weekend,
Jon