The Meredith Moat

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Good evening, and welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly email on the inner workings of the American media industry. Tonight, some high-level observations on the state of the news media, startups real and imagined, and the seemingly impenetrable success of The New York Times.

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The Meredith Moat

In an era of unprecedented disruption—new mediacos, new models, highly capitalized competitors, and CNN gyrations—none of the big guns are holding a candle to the Times.

DYLAN BYERS

In the premiere episode of the fourth season of HBO’s Succession, that amusingly precise and insightful roman à clef of the media industry—“I am convinced Jesse Armstrong has the transcripts of Rupert’s rants and inner monologues,” one media executive in a position to know such things recently told me—the hapless Roy siblings are revealed to be toiling away on a new startup, The Hundred, which Kendall describes as “Substack meets MasterClass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.” This absurd, idea-less name-dropping pitch-deck babble was quickly embraced by journalists and Succession enthusiasts (it’s a heavily-shaded Venn diagram, to be sure), who delighted in a critique of the various behaviors on display: bullshit-laden start-up ideation, born-on-third-base fundraising arrogance, general vanity, and the craven lust for influence...

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FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT