The Journalist and the Brand: is Puck the future of our media?
Hope you're having a nice August. Are you on holiday? Me neither!
I was thinking of writing this week on digital communities, the tribes of superfans who populate the web. This was on the back of me being relentlessly trolled (and, infrequently, threatened violence) by LGBTQ teenagers, after I gave the Netflix show, H*artstopper, a 2-star review. That review knocked its previously 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes down to 98% – still a pretty good score, I’d have thought – which is, apparently, something that matters to its fans. But, to be honest, even though I’m broadly impervious to anonymous accounts calling me ugly, stupid and writing to my employee to suggest my firing, I don’t have much desire to prolong the experience. The occasional pile-on is a sign that the work you’re doing is cutting through; the relentless pile-on is a mind-numbing, destabilising experience. Almost everyone who has a negative relationship with social media – including, I should add, over-indulgence – is engaged in a perpetual, attritional battle with their trolls. It might make you feel important to be hated, but I’m not sure it’s worth stoking. And so, instead…
If I were asked to pick a favourite media company named after a Shakespeare character, I’d have to go with Puck. After all, nobody is responding to my pitch-decks for Caliban – an unsocialised look at how language has destroyed the world. “The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!”
Puck – which I am writing about today only because it has bucked the general media trend and managed to raise more money – has a good central idea. There are, in their opinion, four bases of American power: Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. It’s a neat idea, one that encompasses government, finance, tech and culture (which is to say, broadly everything (with the exception of sports)). It also gives them a pan-American approach, ranging from the West Coast hubs of Los Angeles and San Francisco to the East Coast climes of Washington DC and New York. The New Yorker’s Clare Malone referred to Puck as “the email newsletter for the mogul set”, which is to say that it’s a pricey product for the rich. “Élite journalists are our influencers,” Jon Kelly, Puck’s co-founder, told Malone. “And there is a chance to arbitrage the confluence of their influence and their opportunities.”
Like almost every emerging media business, Puck’s product is rooted in newsletters. Sure, there’s a Puck website – Puck.news – but the brains in charge know that giving their subscribers access to high quality, straight-to-inbox information is the pitch. It works on the assumption that its readers aren’t people like myself (someone who is writing this newsletter from the pub, on a Thursday afternoon, complete with a pint of Guinness) but the elite. If they’re not actually the elite, then they still think of themselves as the elite – or aspire to be part of the elite. Just look at the way that they label their pricing structure: for $100 a year you get to be a “member”, but for $250 you get to be part of the “Inner Circle” complete with a red verification tick, the likes of which Twitter X has disavowed. Inner Circle members get “off the record conference calls with authors & staff” as well as “exclusive in-person gatherings”. In short, the idea is to create a product that intersects a blog with a private members’ club.
Puck has this week announced another $10m in Series B funding which is a rare win for a media ecosystem that has been barracked by relentless economic jeers. As Brian Morrissey notes, in his fine newsletter The Rebooting, “the media business is still hard”. Morrissey observes that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, is set to lose $100m on his newspaper, while Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of The Great Turtle-Necked One, still can’t find a route to profitability for The Atlantic. Only the New York Times seems to buck the trend – but there are far more projects falling off or failing altogether than there are outliers. And so Puck’s fundraising, however modest (the round values the outlet at $75m, which, when you consider Vice Media was once valued at over $5bn, is quite a reasonable figure), is a good sign. A dove, circling above the flood waters.
Or maybe it’s just the last media idea that feels like tech, and can be valued as such.
The truth is that there are few insurgent media companies that are playing with the idea of what a media company can be. The most innovative thing that Puck has done – and, I confess, it’s an idea that I’ve had and continue to nurture – is signing its star journalists up as equity stakeholders in the project, and remunerating them, partially, on the basis of membership referrals. This is a simple idea, and one employed by many start-ups, that gives early employees a stake in the continued success of the endeavour. It has added to the sense that Puck is a club – one where its elite journalists (or “élite”, as the New Yorker would say (and they should know)) are also sales reps for the brand.
This is all the more pressing because we are increasingly in an era where the delineation of journalist and brand is elided. When you think back on the great journalists of the 20th century, you’ll likely associate that name with a title: Carl Bernstein and the Washington Post, John Hersey and the New Yorker, Christopher Hitchens and Vanity Fair. Great names – names that could sell papers or magazines – were given a forum, a megaphone, by great media brands. And then the internet came along and it smashed up that fundamental dynamic. For a while it felt like that the blog, the self-publisher, would come to dominate the media scene. And then, with a whimper, economic pressures killed that dream. The brand reasserted itself. The journalist returned to a position as both vessel and vassal.
But things are changing again. This is partially because MediaTech is single-mindedly focused on empowering individual creators. Whether it’s Substack or Patreon or OnlyFans: it’s never been easier to make your audience pay for their product. It’s also partly because the squeezed establishment is cutting to ribbons its staffing costs. Matt Yglesias can make far more money writing Slow Boring than he can at Vox; Bari Weiss can make more money with The Free Press than with the New York Times.
But just look at how Yglesias and Weiss are branding their endeavours. “Slow Boring”, “The Free Press”: these are brands, not journalists. It’s the same across the top-earning Substacks: Heather Cox Richardson writes “Letters From an American”, Matt Taibbi writes “Racket”, Gergely Orosz writes “The Pragmatic Engineer”. (I, my audience implore me to say, write “Future Proof”). If you told a digital native, who’d never previously heard of it, of the existence of Puck, would they think it was a collective of writers or a single mind?
This blurry line is further blurred by the existence of brands who are heavily – or totally – reliant on single personalities. Just look at the way that Barstool has bombed in a post-Dave Portnoy world. Portnoy is Barstool, sure as Andrew Breitbart was Breitbart or Ash Sarkar is Novara. Brands used to build personalities, now personalities build brands.
Puck’s success feels like a statement on the realignment present in the media ecosystem. A $75m valuation to reflect the fact that a start-up has a bunch of talented, experienced, and well-read writers leading its coverage. The danger with the strategy is how you keep building when, and if, the writers start to exceed the limits of the brand. What if the advantages of being an employee of, and shareholder in, Puck fall below the advantages of running your own shop? The current of centralisation exhibited by Puck is inevitably at odds with the dominant current of giving writers their own autonomy, their own audience, their own paywall. If they come into conflict, who wins?
I’m hoping, in the next few weeks to launch a new podcast project that I’ve been vaguely working on for a bit. You can see it as, essentially, a continuation of this newsletter, albeit in audio form. If you’re curious about what I’m doing – or *cough* want your business to be the sponsor – please email me to nick@podotpods.com