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Happy Monday and welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon
compendium of Puck’s best new reporting.

Today, we lead with Dylan Byers’exclusive reporting on the anticlimactic denouement of Will Lewis’s six-month executive editor search: the appointment of acting executive editor Matt Murray as the newsroom’s permanent chief—a fitting capstone to a lackluster search effort that never quite
came to fruition.

Plus, below the fold: Bill Cohan assesses how Comcast, WBD, and Paramount are preparing for a lively M&A landscape in ’25. Marion Maneker digs into Sotheby’s abrupt volte-face on its controversial fee structure. And Abby Livingston evaluates whether Elon Musk has already squandered his political capital. On The Varsity,
John Ourand rings up SMAC Entertainment boss Constance Schwartz-Morini to discuss the strategy behind managing her star-packed talent roster. On Somebody’s Gotta Win, Tara Palmeri and legal scholar John Yoo debate the limits of Trump’s executive power. On Impolitic, John Heilemann convenes with Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield to size up the past
year in music. And on The Powers That Be, Jon Kelly and Peter Hamby examine the budding December rivalry between the NFL and college football.

After an excruciating six-month search, Washington Post C.E.O. Will Lewis is getting
ready to appoint acting executive editor Matt Murray as the paper’s new editorial leader, concluding a drawn-out and turbulent recruitment process for the beleaguered newsroom. It was an open secret that Murray, who has been pottering around since his exit from The Wall Street Journal, coveted the job and thought he had an outside shot, but Lewis nevertheless cast about for alternatives, searching for a swashbuckling innovator to become his wingman. But as candidates from
across the Post’s competitive landscape—including New York Times masthead fixtures Carolyn Ryan and Cliff Levy, and former Post editors Anne Kornblut and Steven Ginsberg—started bowing out, all roads seemed to lead back to Murray.

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There’s been lots of speculation about Hollywood M&A activity next year, and for all the obvious
reasons: a new transactional Trump regime, the end of Lina Khan’s reign at the F.T.C., and of course, the recent one-two punch of Comcast’s SpinCo announcement and Warner Bros Discovery’s gestural move to reorganize the company by separating its declining cable assets from its growing studio and streaming businesses. This has set the stage for a potential wave of consolidation in the new year and beyond, and Bill reveals how he thinks these pieces might come together to form a new industrial
architecture. Will David Zaslav combine his digital assets with NBCU’s, completing the final act of his public L.B.O. experiment? Will Disney participate in the linear spinco feeding frenzy? Will Comcast’s SpinCo actually become a buyer, or will it fall into the hands of private equity? 

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Sotheby’s bold new fee structure was meant to transform the auction business, lowering buyer
premiums and encouraging bidders to throw caution to the wind. But last week, the auction house announced it was walking back these changes, and raising the most broadly applicable buyer’s premium from 20 to 27 percent. In the end, Sotheby’s fee changes made it even harder to land good property at a time when supply in the art market is already constrained by other factors: prices haven’t gone up in a long time, and collectors just don’t want to let things go. Critics have argued that Sotheby’s
plan was too aggressive, and as Marion reports, without the financial stability to sustain these changes, the auction house lacked the runway to signal long-term commitment. But with signs portending a strong 2025 for the art market, is a more sustainable change to current fee structures in the offing?

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In Washington, the pre-holiday scramble to avoid a government shutdown has become a seasonal
tradition, with lawmakers often racing to pass a funding bill to avoid spending Christmas in D.C. This year, however, the inevitable activity was particularly tumultuous. Last week, of course, Donald Trump and Elon Musk tanked a bipartisan bill via social media diatribes, and Speaker Mike Johnson spent the ensuing days navigating a noxious morass of egos, ideology, and confusion. And while a slimmed-down bill eventually made it to Joe Biden’s desk, Abby reports that congressional insiders
believe Musk’s stunning and ham-fisted intervention might create problems for the Tesla chief when he eventually needs support for his DOGE agenda. 

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Constance Schwartz-Morini, the C.E.O. and co-founder of SMAC Entertainment, sits down with John
to share her journey as a trailblazer in talent management, providing an inside look at the ins and outs of running a talent firm and managing a roster of high-profile clients including Deion Sanders, Michael Strahan, and Erin Andrews. She also sheds light on her bold decision to leave a promising career at the NFL—where she started as an assistant—to carve out her own path as an entrepreneur.

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Tara is joined by legal scholar and former political advisor John Yoo to discuss the parameters
of Donald Trump’s executive power as we inch closer to his Oval Office return. They examine the myriad ways Trump can manipulate the justice system, talk about the ways he can strengthen his influence further, and shine a light on the viability of some of his proposed executive orders.

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John is joined by longtime Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield to size up the past year
in music. Sheffield discusses the final show of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour (which, naturally, he attended), the otherworldly success of the tour and the album it spawned, The Tortured Poets Department, and Swift's vast cultural and commercial significance. Sheffield also weighs in on Rolling Stone’s top 10 albums of the year and teases his own forthcoming list, gushes over the new Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles documentary, and reassures Bob Dylan devotees that their fears
about A Complete Unknown, the imminent Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, are misplaced.

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Jon Kelly reunites with Peter to weigh in on the latest headlines occupying the media landscape
this holiday season: a new set of details regarding ABC News and Disney’s defamation lawsuit settlement, the beleaguered Washington Post concluding its executive editor sweepstakes, the budding December rivalry between the NFL and college football, and much, much more.

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