Vivek’s Money Trail, Putsch Murmurs, Amazon’s ESPN Fantasy

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon compendium of Puck’s latest reporting.

First up today, Julia Alexander explains how CNN’s new streaming product could take a page from YouTube and TikTok as David Zaslav prepares to launch a pseudo-simulcast version on Max next month.

Plus, below the fold: Julia Ioffe chronicles Russia's post-Prigozhin shockwaves and the rumblings of a putsch to come. Dylan Byers scoops CNN’s next chief from across the pond. Teddy Schleifer charts Vivek’s promotion to the G.O.P. donor big leagues. And on The Powers That Be, Eriq Gardner huddles up with Peter Hamby to inspect Trump’s trial strategies, while Bill Cohan and Ben Landy contemplate the P&L of ESPN+ on Amazon.

JULIA ALEXANDER

CNN, as we know it, may not make the transition to Max, especially as a 24/7 news source. It’s the perfect opportunity for WBD executives to reimagine the news product and format for a new generation.

JULIA IOFFE

Life in Moscow after the falling plane: the anxieties of the elite, oligarch objectives, the future of Wagner, and the Russian rump state in Africa.

DYLAN BYERS

The former New York Times C.E.O., who rescued the company from its financial nadir and morphed it into a best-in-class digital media behemoth, will become the next chairman and C.E.O. of CNN.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER

Sure, he strikes plenty of donors as arrogant and annoying in a Harvard debate-kid kind of way. But his campaign is now very real. Vivek has serious financial hype after the first presidential debate, and the G.O.P. heavies have to reckon with him, whether they like it or not.