The Press Box - Ohio State and Barstool, the Great Film Critic Shortage, and the MS NOW Acronym Challenge. Plus: Michael M. Grynbaum on the Past and Future of Condé Nast.

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David open up the show by talking about Rich Eisen’s return to the 'SportsCenter' desk. Then they discuss a report that Dave Portnoy was banned from Ohio Stadium (6:17) and talk about the state of local film critics (16:50). They also check in on their MS NOW challenge (31:28) and run through the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week before Bryan is joined by Michael M. Grynbaum of The New York Times. They discuss his new book: 'Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.' They talk about the history and future of Condé Nast, the company that owns Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker (45:54). Finally, David guesses the Strained Pun Headline of the Week (1:18:57)!Hosts: Bryan Cutis and David ShoemakerGuest: Michael M. GrynbaumProducer: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, this is a true story. I have a friend who once faked his own death so he could have more time to watch his favorite TV show. In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies they tell, from forging new identities to taking their love of Game of Thrones a little too far. From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, I'm Brian Phillips. Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever. you get your podcasts. Yes.

I was having a little late August reverie last week. Oh. I was going back to a cherished decade in my life and yours, the 90s. Sure. And the occasion was Rich Eisen. Yeah. Sports Center anchor of the late 90s was back on the show again. Mm-hmm.

we've talked about how Rich Eisen is bringing his podcast slash radio show to ESPN to mark the occasion ESPN had him come do SportsCenter one more time. First time in 22 years he's been behind that desk. Yep. What I want to talk to you about is the language of 90s SportsCenter. Please. Dude, I can't tell you how this hit me. It was a little bit like listening to a 90s song and bathing yourself in that particular sound.

But I think even more than that, it was like picking up an old magazine from the 90s and reading how it was written and edited. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because there's a certain economy of language to it. Mm-hmm. A certain tightness to the prose. Yeah, it's a strunken white stuff, man. Yeah.

And also just a sense of like talking about sports in a particular way. Can we describe 90s Sports Center language together? Sure. I would call it nerdy and eager. Yep. Just characteristic of people doing NFL breakdowns today. But there was also a little bit of a remove. something a little professorial about it.

Okay. You were almost acknowledging how cool the action on the field was, but also standing a bit back from it. Yeah, the ironic intellectual distancing, yeah. We would hear that tone, I feel, on television in other places. The other thing that ESPN was doing was also mixing sports with pop culture. Mm-hmm. that's a mix you might read here at the ringer every single day yeah they get infected a lot of

people yeah but back in the late 90s early odds having someone you know hit a home run and they go say hello to my little friend yeah that was exciting that was different when we have a little dose of retro sports center david i feel the first thing people do especially people are age to say why can't we do that regularly. Can we bring back 90 sports center in whole or in part, do you think? You mean like, I have to take it back to wrestling. WW just the beginning of this year brought back Saturday Night's main event and they made

a big deal of putting the graphics packages of the original 80s production back. They brought everything back to the old days. You mean just like the 90s graphics packages of ESPN? I mean, the theme song hasn't changed. but I'm sure there's a there's a rough change. It doesn't have that saxophone music like I used to. I was going to say there's got to be a rough recording of it too that'll sound more of the moment, maybe maybe just deliberately go out of HD for the night, you know?

I mean, is that, is it, are you talking going that extreme or just the like hosts or or keep the current host and just go with the style? I think a little bit of everything. I guess what I most miss was when that show was really a writer's medium. Yeah. And we can really never bring that back just because the world's changed so much. Sure. The idea of somebody would spend like a minute setting up a highlight that you already know the result of.

That's just not going to be workable in 2025. Probably. Yeah, a little bit of everything. You know, I go back and forth on retro. Remember ESPN brought back that old college football music for the SEC last year. And I was like, this wasn't a great song to begin with. Why are we doing this? I know.

This is depressing my interest in important. SEC games. But somehow the I'm like, oh, I'm here. Yeah, absolutely. I'm 21 years old again. Give me the sports news anchor person. Yep, absolutely true.

It'll get you going every time. I might have something more to say about Rich Eisen and his sports center experience later on the ringer.com. Check out the website for that. But coming up, David, on our late August edition of the press box. Now on the press box, as Keith Olderman used to say,

we're just talking about Barstool. Was Barstool banned from Ohio Stadium on the first week of their Fox Big Noon kickoff deal? Plus, do local newspapers need a film critic? The MS Now Bad Acronym Challenge. Plus, I'll have a visit with Michael Grinbaum, the author of a new book about Condé Nast,

the company that gave us The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. David also will break his silence about the whole Travis Kelsey Taylor Swift engagement. I know everybody's been waiting for that. All that and much more on the press box. A point of the rigger podcast network. Oh, media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shumaker, and producer Isaiah Blakely, who's sitting in for Kyle with you.

David, it wouldn't be late August without a bar stool story. college football season really kicks off Saturday at noon Eastern 9 a.m. Pacific. Yeah. Ohio State, Texas in Columbus. The game's on Fox. As you and I talked about a few weeks ago, Fox partnered up with Barstool for its Big Noon kickoff show. Yeah. This is the way they're going to challenge college game day, the tonight show of the genre.

Mm-hmm. Last night, we got a story from front office sports from Ryan Glassbeagle saying, quote, the newly minted, only in journalism, Fox Barstool College Football Partnership, already has some drama even before the first game. Ohio State is barring Barstool sports from campus and its founder Dave Portnoy from entering Ohio Stadium for the school's huge opening week matchup against Texas on Saturday. Sources told front office sports. What did you make of this story?

Um, listen, we know where we are now, right? I mean, there's some, there's some question about the veracity of any, of all of this. It felt a little bit, maybe it's too easy to say it in hindsight, but it felt a little bit sketchy from the start. I think, um, if it were true, it felt more like a very, almost like a canny attention grabbing media ploy by someone or by all parties involved than anything else. especially when the early reports were that it was all concerning Portnoy's fandom

his Michigan boosterism. And that and it's, I mean, listen, it seems like people were genuinely, on the Ohio state side were generally upset that such a notable Michigan fan got such a prominent placement in the, I guess, nominally impartial world of Big Noon.

And even that shocked me a little bit. I think I was perplexed by the whole thing. You know, I don't, I'm not a, I don't, I don't have the level of college football fandom that you do. So maybe you can, maybe, maybe it all made a little bit more sense to you into the big fans that he would potentially be banned because of his booster status. But like, I was just sort of perplexed by the whole thing. And so I just thought it was another, you know, stunt by someone.

It's very funny to say, we have a problem with Dave Port. Yeah. And the problem is he went to Michigan. Yeah. That's the problem. None of the other stuff were, we're upset about it's that he went to Michigan. Yeah. And the kind of fine grain here is that when you do a college football pregame show like Big Noon or Game Day, you start outside the stadium. Because of course you want the stadium is that very cool backdrop at the beginning of the show. and then during a late commercial break, you take your announcers and you march them several hundred yards into the stadium

with a police escort. I've done this with the game day crew. I've actually done it at Ohio Stadium. Let me tell you, this is like an embassy evacuation. I mean, just imagine what people are saying to Pat McAfee. Yeah. College football fans are saying to Pat McAfee as he walks into a stadium. I mean, it's just an unbelievable atmosphere.

Yeah. So the specific thing we read was that Ohio Stadium said, well, Dave Portnoy is going to be on the show, but he's not going to be inside the stadium. Then we get a report this morning from Ross Delinger at Yahoo saying Ohio State did not issue a ban on Dave Portnoy, a ban on Dave Portnoy. That's funny to me somehow. A.D. Ross, Bjork tells Yahoo, Bjork confirms that Fox decided Portnoy would not. be on the main desk of big noon kickoff, and those not on the desk do not normally appear on the field. These are Fox decisions he emphasized. So now we're even getting to a finer distinction of sports television. You're on the pregame show, but are you on the desk?

Yeah. So he was going to be on the pregame show. That was never in question. It's just whether or not he was sitting at the desk. Well, this is what we're reading now. I mean, I could imagine the desk being the big stars of the show, right? Your linerts, your Rob Stones, your Brady Quinn's. Sure. And Dave would either join it from time to time or he'd be off on his own special barstool desk, which might even have four wheels and drive around through the crowds or

something. Like that was, the idea was that he was always going to be entertainment on the show an additive to the show, not a permanent college football analyst. Yeah. And regardless, I mean, one can imagine there being a little bit of a, you know, cold feet. I'm not worried that, I don't think that Fox is worried with second guessing their partnership. But like, you know, with Ohio State playing and Portnoy being a very vocal detractor there, is I mean, there could be something said live on the air that would become an issue for them.

And don't you think they kind of want something to be said on the air that would become an issue? you for them. Yeah. You don't give Dave Portnoy on the show, be like, hey, can you tell us about the nuances of NIL? Yeah.

No, no, no. We're doing this because we want controversy. Mm-hmm. We want some kind of McAfee style element that gets people to turn on the show

and not turn off the show. Yeah. And that's the whole idea. I am surprised when I read, I was surprised like you were when I read the first thing about Ohio State saying no because it would take a lot to me to ban somebody from a stadium

if they were part of the broadcast crew that is paying your conference a ton of money to show your games yes like who would they have to pick for you to be like actually you can't bring that person in here I mean we should know the game is on Fox you know Gus Johnson Joel Clyde calling the game from the booth, but we've now decided that this one person you've picked can't come in? Yeah. And how far do we extend that? Like Pat McAfee, does he get to go to Ole Miss? Well, I mean, one would presume that.

Can he go to the Grove? Yeah. I mean, if someone getting banned from the stadium is either, I mean, on a very low level, I'm sure, is just the stadium security team or whatever. But if it's a notable name who's not been there or not committed an offense on the grounds, one would assume in any other situation, that would go all the way up to the university president. You know, this is going to be a PR issue. This is going to be, you know, this is going to be a thing that we have to make a formal statement about for it to be one of your broadcast partners.

I mean, in some ways it seems a little bit easier because it does feel stunty, you know, you could be like, oh, this guy is too pro Michigan. We're not letting him in. And it's kind of funny, but it's still, it's not a gag when you like ban someone from a stadium, right? I mean, that's, you can't just, it's like you can't fake fire somebody just for laughs, you know? I mean, there's actual, like, real ramifications to it. So, I don't know. I mean, Portnoyano was already out there in like a fake mustache joking around about it and put out a statement that he felt bad, you know, for the partners at Fox before

came out that it was Fox who actually apparently made the decision. It should be noted the front office sports story is sort of evolved since the original, I believe, since its original reporting. But it was a, you know, it went from being a ban to a Fox consideration. I mean, who knows? I don't want to get too conspiratorial, but if it was a Fox consideration, it probably behooves Portnoy

and the entire Barstool crew to make it seem like he was banned by Ohio State, right? To lean into that version of events. It's not like he was being sidelined by Fox. He's being wronged, you know, by Big Evil OSU. Yeah, maybe there's some of that in there. There's also another level of fandom here that's worth pointing out, Fox has the best Big Ten football games.

Their marriage is with the Big Ten. YesPN has got all of the SEC football games. So their marriages to the SEC. So Portnoy just being a Big Ten guy, never mind the Michigan, Ohio State distinction, that is part of the network fandom at play here. Yeah. The networks will insist, well, we're not, you know, we don't root for our conferences over the other conferences.

We do this college, well, and mostly that's true. Or it's somewhat true, but also they're in bed with these conferences. Yeah. Like if Ohio State or Michigan goes out and wins another national championship, that's good for Fox or just has great seasons because they have better games to show all year. Yeah. Same thing with ESPN ABC, with Texas, Alabama, Georgia, everybody else. Mm-hmm.

You mentioned the Portnoy response. When I saw this story, I'm like, here's a lot. the thing about these controversies or non-controversy maybe in this case, they always redound to Portnoy and Barstool. Yes. Remember the Van Talk cancellation on ESPN back in 2017? Yep. Like, did that hurt the careers of PFT and Big Cat?

Actually, no. It made them too dangerous for ESPN. Yeah. Now we got too dangerous for Ohio Stadium, whether true or not. And you're like, oh, man. he's going to milk this like, just like crazy. Like this, what an absolute dream of a story. Mm-hmm.

For that guy. And it seems to always work out that way. For sure. On another matter, David. We got some news from Chicago. Fine city, Chicago. Yeah. Find journalism history there.

Chicago Tribune had a film critic named Michael Phillips. he's been at the paper for 24 years those interested in the Chicago Tribune film critic timeline will know that the critic spot went from Gene Siskel to Michael Wilmington to Michael Phillips Well last Tuesday Phillips wrote on Twitter The Chicago Tribune has eliminated the post of film critic This has left me two options wait for a newsroom reassignment or take the buyout I took the buyout.

Yeah. Other people noted that Richard Roper of the competing paper, The Chicago Sun Times, took a buyout back in March. Yep. So the city that gave the world Siskel and Ebert no longer has a full-time print film critic. That's a tweet from Brian Telerico who runs Ebert's website. Where do we start here? Oh, man.

I mean, this feels like one of those moments, it's going to sink in for people, I think, even people who aren't paying close attention that these important jobs are being eliminated. Still, it's major papers. You know, like so many of these conversations, there is a degree to which the job title, or the job has become a little bit outmoded

just with the rise of the internet and social media and whatever else. I mean, there's a lot of people who do a better job or doing movies online, long form or short form or microform, than what newspapers sort of allow now. It's not like you're left with only the Rotten Tomatoes rating to know whether or not you should see a movie. But the Rotten Tomatoes rating has done, you know, does a lot to replace, I think,

a lot of people's use of film reviews. And yet, it seems like an important cultural institution, you know, there probably hasn't been like a dire need to have a theater critic at the New York Times for a decade or two, you know, but it's like it serves an important role in our sort of journalistic cultural hierarchy. And if you're, I mean, Chicago,

like, you have to, like if there were, you would imagine that if there were like six people left standing, that one would be the film critic, right? I mean, that's just, just in honor of Ebert, in honor of, Siskel and Iber at the movies, whatever, that they would just keep that position going.

But, you know, that didn't happen. You and I grew up in a time when our film critics were local film critics. Yeah. When Pulp Fiction came out, you and I didn't say, hey, what does Anthony Lane think about this movie? Because we didn't know who Anthony Lane was. No. We knew the film critics in the Four Star Telegram in Dallas, More, morning news.

And in a time when most journalism was local journalism, every paper had to have a critic. Yeah. Because how would you know whether a movie was good or not? So I think we can both agree that it sucks that they're not going to have a film critic. That's bad on some level. I think the more complicated question is, if you were an editor at the show, Chicago Tribune, if you're playing a bad hand, hey man, you only have X many slots to cover culture. I'd say 10, that might be high. But let's say it's a very, very tiny number.

Given the way the world's changed, do you want a film critic to be one of those people? I think at the Chicago sometimes it's it's a yes is an easy answer and I don't mean it's a good answer. I just think it's a very safe answer, right? But you could just as easily make the case that we have introducing our new forward facing cultural critic who will take on movies a lot. You know, and sort of this is that this is what the new Roger Ebert looks like in 2025, you know. I just want a critic. Yeah. I just want someone who's,

I want someone who's as fluent in, in, you know, memes as they are in movies, you know, I think I just wrote a great tagline there. But, but,

Alden Global Capital Capital, take note. But yeah, I mean, but from a strictly, if we're not talking about Chicago, if we're talking about, you know,

Washington, D.C. or, you know, Miami or something like that. I mean, no, I don't,

I mean, isn't the problem, though, with so many of these staff reductions, especially in the, in the culture department that, like, they just, it's not like the newspapers have decided to scale down. They've, like, by and large, just decided to start running AP copy. You know, it's just like they start, they just run filler copy that's even less interesting or compelling than what would have been run otherwise, you know, by the staffer. And it just seems like it had a much reduced. I'm sure they get it for much cheaper.

But it's not like they're out there finding whatever, the, the, the brilliant young mom. on social media who they can pay relatively lower wages to or something and running theirs. I mean, it's just there's, it's, it's being replaced with just junk. It's absolutely junk. It's not being, it's not being filled with something better. Or even nothing. I could, I would understand nothing. We don't, we, the paper and the ink is too expensive. Okay. You know, whatever. But it's just being filled with like, literally it's, I mean, I'm sure people read that stuff. But to me, I just see it. It's just like immediate skip, just absence of absence of content. If we think about playing this bad hand that local newspapers are playing,

the question you've got to be thinking of all the time is, what's the thing I can do here that no one else can do? And that will help me sell subscriptions. Yeah. So if you're like, man, I'm going to go find a young film critic. And let's say, best case scenario, he turns into Justin Chang or Wesley Morris, that level of talent, is that going to help me sell subscriptions to the Chicago Tribune that covering something local would not, right? Is that going to put butts in the seats? And, you know, I don't know what to hurt, right? Like, would certainly make it more interesting, make your arts pages more interesting. Newspaper arts pages, by the way you talk about if you just if we're looking at desiccated newspapers the arts pages are by

and large really really bad they have taken a huge run of this for the because of those forces you're talking about fact that there's just stuff out there but that's just to me that's a really tough one you know if i had five jobs yeah you know and you maybe you're i think your instinct maybe right it's like i just want a critic i want somebody who's sinking their teeth into stuff and can go to a big play that opens in Chicago that can review a book that everybody's talking about. That can hit movies, you know, especially the big ones every year.

But, you know, they don't have to review freaky or Friday. I think I'll be okay without that. Yeah. There's someone can write, or yes, review multiple things at once, kind of take a more wide-ranging view of everything. And, you know, when you talk about the larger forces at play, someone, if someone, if it's one person as opposed to four or five,

someone you could nominally afford to retain a year from now when they get an offer from a bigger paper or, you know, a bigger website or whatever else. Sure. The thing I was thinking that is just like the job of the film critic generally. Phil film critics have followed a trajectory that newspaper sports columnists have filled. Remember when the newspaper sports columnist was the big, you're in the sports section. Sure. And everything flowed from that job.

Film critics are kind of the same way in the sense that I miss both of those jobs. Because as much as I disagreed often with sports columnists or film critics, I felt they were at least grappling with the idea of is this good or is this bad? Yes. In the case of the film critic, is this movie worth spending your money on? on and spending your time on. And if you look at those jobs, especially at local papers, it was a very consumer-oriented job. Yeah.

And I say this is somebody who would love in my heart of hearts to see 50 or 100 movies a year. I'm not. I'm not going to see a tiny number of movies here just because I don't have time. So the people I want to listen to or read are people that are like, I'm going to tell you whether you should see this or not. Yeah. Like, I don't have time for dabbling of that things. Oh, 65% on Ron Tomatoes.

I don't know. Is that good enough? I'd probably not going to make that leap. Yeah. But I feel if we get totally away from critics, from film critics, if we kind of replace it with just stuff, eventually you do just lose a little bit of that guidance. Yeah. It's true.

I mean, and it's, it's hard to. it's it's hard to know what to do i mean that these newspapers especially local papers have been dwindling forever and we've talked about it before you go home to visit your folks and what used to be the robust pretty big city newspaper is now like a quarter of the size it was before and the arts pages are like i said you know wire stories and you know if they're lucky printed on two sides of one sheet it's it's hard to make a sort of moralistic argument in the face of whatever financial pressure they're under but at the same time it seems like an era that's really open for innovation it just doesn't seem like there's any sort of impetus to push people towards it you know i mean if you were the editor

of the forward star telegram or even something a smaller paper and you just change the mold if you If you figured out exactly the way to restaff and reassign and make a, you know, turn a paper with 20% of the staff it once had into this vital force in 10 different ways, do you think that would get you a promotion? Do you think that would give you any job security? Do you think that would, do you think that whatever hedge fund owns your paper is going to care about a 41% growth? No. No. And the thing that used to stop you from doing that 10 years ago, was that the people that were still subscribing,

especially to the print paper, were older. And if you change stuff, they'd be like, what have you done with marmaduke, sir? This is the reason I still pay you money. But now it's kind of like, what do you have to lose? Yeah.

What other than making, you know, your hedge fund bosses mad? Because they're like, no, no, no, we were just squeezing the money out of this. We didn't actually want this thing to succeed. Yeah.

We just wanted to bleed it dry. Please don't save the newspaper. No, Marmaduke's going to be okay. Marmaduke's going to be okay. By the way, did you see the Michael Phillips author photo? Michael Phillips, and I don't mean this is an insult at all. Michael Phillips looks like a stage actor playing a film critic, sort of, you know, is just like this or the movie version, the stage actor that was like,

this is a famous play about the newsroom. This is the man that we've cast to play the film critic, just very like, just that immaculate beard that maybe you're like high school music teacher had at a, you know, glasses and, and just a kind of, you know, good looking fellow, but he's just perfectly cast in his role as, and he came from theater too, right? He was a former theater critic. He looks apart, man. It was a very professional author photo. I'm not even sure what's an author for, is it an author photo? Is it an author photo? He's wearing like a, like a half zip.

Like, like it's, it looked like the photo you see in the back of the play bill. Yeah, for sure. The cast of the show.

Yes. Two quick things for you, David. We're just over a week before the NFL season starts. That's Cowboys Eagles a week from Thursday. And we're getting a final blast

of insiderdom. Micah Parsons still needs a new contract. Jacoby Myers requesting a trade from the Raiders. Bengals finally signed. their defensive end Trey Hendrickson. This is a very funny tweet from Sam Monson, NFL analyst

and podcaster. He writes, agents should hold a pool to see what the most ridiculous thing they can get an insider to put in their tweet is. Wait, what? What's the most ridiculous thing? Yeah, because you now know the agent,

we now must mention the agent in the insider tweet. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. Great job by so-and-so. And it's some name we've never heard of. They're always linked in the tweet now. or they're mentioned in the tweet. I found a pretty good one.

I don't know if this was an agent or not, but Ian Rappaport of the NFL network was tweeting about Trey Hendrickson. And he says, another of the NFL's high profile Holdens is done. Trey Hendrickson is back. As one source said, quote, it's time to get back to football.

Did we need to grant that source anonymity? Wait, is that not, is it Trey Hendrickson? Is that the implication? because it doesn't make really any sense. Unless it could be the agent. I don't do. It could be anybody because the fact of the matter is if you have a new contract,

it is time to get back to football. It's hard to argue with that sentiment. Thank you. Anyway, Sam, consider that the first nominee for your contest. And speaking of contest, David. Oh, yeah. I'm excited about this. I know nothing about it.

We have an alert listener, Rylund Aldrich, who heard us talking about MS now. MSNBC is rebranding as MS Now. And David and I gave the new name a poor review. And we gave it an even poorer review when we found out that MS now stands for my source for news opinion and the world. It's worth noting that we gave it a bad review, but our reviewer positions are being eliminated next week.

Yes, the ringer has chosen not to replace us. By the way, as I was staring at this, I'm like, my source, okay, my source for news, my source for opinion, that tracks, my source for the world. I want to tweak that up just a tad. Turns out, David, there are a number of bad acronyms out in the world. Oh, God. So I would like to introduce to you a new feature here at the press box pod, the MS now tortured acronym challenge. All right.

I love this. I asked listeners, send us some of your favorites and some of the most tortured ones you know of and boy, they responded. We got a lot of stuff. One small note, there's some question about what constitutes an acronym. An acronym is, I think, officially a word that you can say as its own word like scuba. Yeah? if it was SCB, that would not be an acronym.

Okay, we can be pendants here at the press box with the best of them. We're going to go with anything that stands for something for this particular challenge. Just a note there. Wait, people think that it has to spell, turn into a word? Like, it has to be pronounceable? Well, there's, there's apparently an argument about what is, what is a true acronym versus what are just initials. But we're going to, we're going to think broadly here for the MS now tortured

acronym challenge. All right. Our first nominee comes to us from Owen Seton. David, you've been known to enjoy a James Bond movie or novel from time to time. Sure. I reread a couple of novels earlier this year and just really, really enjoyed that. I'm a big and Ian Fleming guy, you know. James Bond would often be matched up against a bad guy organization known as Spector.

Mm-hmm. Did you know that Spector stands for something? I know that it stands for something because I've, seen it written with periods, but I think, but, and I think that's what all the, was Spector, the original bad acronym villainous organization that like Cobra and all the other like things, cartoons of our childhood drew from? Well, I'm confused. Hydra.

He also had Smirsch. Yeah. Which was a different one, but Spector, if you were wondering, stands for special executive for counterintelligence, terrorism, revenge, and extortion. It's like the thing about like, you know, the bad soldiers always wearing black and red, they ever look in the mirror and just be like maybe we're the bad guys. Like if that's your business card. Yeah.

Usually you don't not confess to the crimes in the title of your organization. Well, sir, the T stands for terrorism. So you're going away for a long time. This was an acronym right under my nose, David. Oh, man. The Espies. The Espies, the annual awards from ESPN. Mm-hmm.

Now, you might have thought like I did that SPs was like the Tonys or the Grammys. Yeah? We just turned ESPN into something with a Y. Actually, according to Drew Schmenter, S-B stands for Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Awards. Why did that need to stand for something? Oh, yearly. I just love yearly. I don't know why that makes me laugh.

I think I would be more, I think I'd be less offended if it was just like excellence in sports performance, yeah. You know? The best ones of these are the most tortured ones, the ones that get three quarters of the way there and then they run out of gas. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. Excellence in sports performance, yeah. you're a comic book person david so you might know about marvel's shield you remember what shield stands for special headquarters something i don't know it's a couple different things you're you're on there uh supreme headquarters comma international espionage and law enforcement division that was the first version of that the second one this is all from Wikipedia. Strategic hazard intervention espionage logistics directorate. Okay.

Why did we need to change division to directorate, which is even clunkier? And then apparently this is settled in the more recent cinematic universe is strategic homeland intervention enforcement and logistics division. Okay. So we went back to division. Thanks to Conlon for that one. Don Steele suggests Arby's

Now Oh, I know I know this one Do you know this one Arby's not a true acronym The Raffle Brothers Came up with Rabe So Raffled Brothers Oh I thought it's because I thought

No I always heard that it's because When they first opened They just served roast beef and root beer Ooh I didn't know that one So those are the two RBs Yeah Well David there's The Raffle Brothers is probably probably

A little bit more compelling Now that I know There was a commercial offering something even more tortured than any of those. DJs love Arby's. LPGs love Arby's. You and I love Arby's. America's roast beef, yes, sir. Whoa.

I called that one. Geez. So we didn't just get the Y in Arby's. We got the apostrophe yes. Yes, sir. Mm-hmm. America's roast beef. Yes, sir. That was an ad campaign for Arby's.

Here's another one and let us once again go back to the poor old Chicago Tribune. If you remember, the Tribune Company was pivoting in a doomed media way back in 2016 and they changed their name for a time to Tronk. Yeah, I remember Tronk. Tronk is just like, God, what a, throw that out and everybody just thinks of the bad days or at least the bad days before these. bad days. Yeah. I had forgotten that Tronk stood for something. Take it away. Trunk ad. This is the future of journalists. This is the future. If you care about media, Tronk stands for a Tribune online content. And it also means pooling of resources. Not true. I'm not sure what's scarier there. Tribune online content or pooling of resources.

Oh my gosh. Not a good sign for those journalists. And lastly, David Rylind Aldrich, who suggested this feature, he brought some great ones of his own during the frozen yogurt craze of the 80s did you ever enjoy a delicious treat from TCBY? Yeah, I know where this is going. Is it this can't be yogurt or the country's best yogurt? It was both of those.

I had forgotten about this can't be yogurt. Well, yeah, it was shocking at the beginning. One, because we were used to yogurt being that runny stuff in the pre-sealed packets in the refrigerator, but too because, you know, it was trying to set it up as a, as something like ice cream, you know, a dessert treat. They had to back off the first acronym because there was a competing chain you'll remember called I can't believe it's yogurt.

Yes. And this can't be yogurt got too close to that. And my Mandela effect, riddle brain, I can't believe it's not yogurt, but that doesn't make any sense. It's just ice cream, it turns out of it. I thought this was frozen yogurt. Some more from Rylan Aldrich. There's actually three different congressional acts here.

There was something called the Stop Smut Act. It's special taxation on pornographic services and marketing using telephones. That was back in 1989. In 2010, we got the Chomp Act introduced in the house. Consumers have options for molar protection. Dentistry. And finally, David, after 9-11, who among us could forget the USA Patriot Act? Oh, no.

An embattled act. Now, you might think Patriot Act after 9-11. That's not an acronym. That doesn't stand for anything. God. What does it stand for? David, not only does Patriot stand for something, but USA is part of the, acronym here. And USA does not

stand for United States of America. It does not, sir. USA Patriot Act stands for uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism. Why was that necessary?

And who got to come up? Is there a, is there like a division of the U.S. House or something? something where like there's two interns that just come up with this stuff all the time or maybe this is like an old hand like the desk editor you know like this guy's been coming up with our bill acronym since 1945 he's the best there is like i would apply for that job that sounds fantastic like the guy who does the front page headlines for the new york post yeah he's just sitting there and congress for years and years if you worked for trent lot in 2001 or the bush white house let us

know, we want to find out who named the USA Patriot Act. That's incredible. Anyway, please let us know if there are any other tortured acronyms, Brian.curtis, the wringer.com or hit me up on social media. You two could win the MS now Tortured acronym Challenge. All right, David, coming up in just 30 seconds, the glittering past and gritty future of the company that owns Vogue Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.

But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke. of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the Press Box Pod where they are always, always gratefully received. I don't know how much you were into the Cracker Barrel logo controversy. I mean, I was aware of it, yeah. How much Cracker Barrel experience do you have? I have a fair bit of Cracker Barrel experience.

I went some growing up, although I can't remember, I don't know how young. I feel like I just kind of went incidentally. I don't know how long they've been around. But I certainly have vague memories of it from the past, but I've done it way more as an adult. It's way more of a pull off the highway when you're taking your kids on a road trip sort of place to eat. You know, you can get a lot of money for not that, not too steep of a tab. Get a lot of money for not too steep a tab. Sorry, you can get a little, a lot of food for not to,

much money. Yeah. Yeah. It was, you know, what is there to say about Cracker Barrow? That's a good place.

It's like, it's a very itch scratchy sort of place. You know, you're driving down the road. You're like, you know what I want right now? Chicken fried steak. But nowhere in the world

will have that except for Cracker Barrow. It won't be the best chicken fried steak. But it'll be good. It'll, it'll scratch that edge. As a fellow student of Southern culture, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit. I don't know that I've been to Cracker Barrow.

barrel. Oh, my God. I mean, going from Fort Worth to Austin, I feel like I passed at least one and perhaps multiple cracker barrels all the time during college. You never as a kid got taken to the country store front section so you could, you don't remember walking through there and getting a free like, like a candy cane or something, not a free from your, someone to buy it for you. If you get a candy cane or a little doodad, those like triangle golf tea games, you know, where it's like a triangle piece of wood and you, and if you don't get, if you, if you're left with five, you're an ignoramus. You don't, I was very much in that milieu, but somehow it was not physically inside the cracker barrel. Yeah. Anyway, Cracker barrel made a number of people mad, including the president of the

United States by removing the older gentleman who is leaning against the barrel. The cracker and the barrel. Yes. That's the joke, David. It was an overword Twitter joke. How are you going to remove both the cracker and the barrel from the cracker barrel logo? You'll be pleased to learn the man is known as Uncle Herschel. And according to Reuters, Uncle Herschel is still going to be on the Cracker Barrel menu,

it's road signs, and it stores. Yeah. But we had a controversy this week involving the president of the United States because he's not in the corporate logo anymore. No. If you tweeted about a story, I could not care less about congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right. Let us bring in Michael Grinbaum, Michael M. Grinbaum, as the byline has it.

He is a New York Times media correspondent and the author of a new book, Empire of the Elite, Inside Condonast, the Media dynasty that reshaped America. It is wonderfully reported, wonderfully written, and happy for me, tightly written. God bless you, Michael, and welcome to the press box. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for those kind words. And yeah, I've been tempted to do a Robert Caro style three-volume history of Condé Nast, you know, the 30-year project. But I thought, well, maybe a condensed version would be a little more convenient for readers. edited as those magazines ever were. You do such a great job here of revealing what happened inside the offices of Condonest.

But you also explain what magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue and The New Yorker meant to readers. What did they mean to you when you were growing up? I grew up. So the first magazines I was reading probably in my early teens were Tina Brown's late 1990s, New Yorker and Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair. And so I grew up in the New England suburbs, not close enough to New York where, you know, maybe I'd go twice a year or something like that. And when those magazines would come through the mail slot, which was like my favorite part of the day, I felt like they were kind of like these beacons to this world of sophistication and like the culture that was happening in New York and Los Angeles and Paris and London. And it was like it kind of was like a whole world out there that, you know, it opened up your eyes to it. And remember, I mean, this is, you know, the very, very earliest years of dial up internet.

So, you know, if you wanted to access the zeitgeist, you did it through print media. So I always grew up kind of with this romantic view of magazines and sort of a feeling that they really created a community, right? before you had a Reddit message board of your fellow, you know, fans or, you know, enthusiasts about whatever topic, you know, you kind of, you communicated through through these print magazines. So, um, so I was always interested in the world and kind of what it, what it meant to people. For people who did not grow up reading New York Observer columns, remind us, how did S.I. Si, Newhouse become the king of magazines? So Condé Nast, the company actually dates back to the Gilded Age.

And it was, there was a guy named Condé Nast who bought Vogue magazine, which at the time was this tiny little gazette that was, you know, read by Housewives on Fifth Avenue. And he kind of created this jazz age magazine empire that then fell apart in the Great Depression. And so the Newhouse family, they were newspaper magnates, but they kind of owned a lot of mid-tier papers in cities like Syracuse and Jersey City and Portland, Oregon. And they bought up Condi Nass for a song. It was basically a bunch of women's magazines that were kind of a forgotten brand. And Cy Newhouse Jr., who was the firstborn son of Sam. Samuel Newhouse, the Patriarch, he was actually kind of this awkward divorcee who didn't really feel comfortable in his father's business empire. And he loved art. He loved culture. And so his father said, look, go learn the magazine business.

You know, go work at glamour for a year and kind of figure out, you know, what the magazine industry is about. And it was really Sye who took this kind of inheritance and first he hired Diana of re-lended Vogue in the 1960s. Then in the 1980s he brings in

Tina Brown and Anna Wintor and he just creates this global magazine empire that really becomes the social arbiter, the cultural gatekeeper of its day. And at the top of it

is this tiny little he was very short, you know, five foot three, five foot four. He'd wear a faded New Yorker sweatshirt to the office. And this kind of diminutive guy was the head of this empire of taste. You mentioned Tina Brown. She becomes editor of Vanity Fair in 1982. What did Tina figure out about the 80s when it came to editing and selling magazines? So what was going on in the 80s, I mean, this is such an interesting change about what

aspiration was in America because you had sort of the rise of, this was the Reagan era, the rise of Wall Street, the sort of moment where there was all this new money flowing into like the yuppie classes. And in a funny way, you know, the whole company, Connie Nass really began, I mean, the Gilded Age was the first time that there was this new upper middle class of people who, a leisure class that had money to spend, that had a new type of status and kind of wanted to find ways to express that, be it in the clothes they wore, the way they decorated their homes, the places they traveled. And the 1980s was kind of a rerun of that in some ways. And also, it was a moment of conspicuous consumption where the yuppies were kind of looking for manuals to living the good life.

You know, what do I do with my Wall Street bonus this year? And so Tina Brown comes in from London. And she was this wonderkind editor who had taken over Tatler magazine and made it sort of the talk of England. And I think she had this view.

She sort of had an unembarrassed view of wealth. I think she said she came to America. She said there's a class system here. There's a status hierarchy. And I'm kind of willing to go in and document it and chronicle it and point out who the power

center, where the power centers are. And in a funny way, I think in America, because we're not used to have it, you know, we don't really talk about our class system. I think that a lot of American editors shied away from that. And Tina had no such qualms. And so you look at her vanity fair. And it's about people like Michael Ovitz and David Geffin, like this kind of this new wealth of the 80s, these new cultural gatekeepers who were sort of taking over Hollywood, taking over Wall Street, Saul Steinberg, Ivan Foski, these Wall Street Raiders, those to me feel like the real Vanity Fair characters of that era. And one fact that I discovered in my research, I had no idea, is that the week that Tina's Vanity Fair debuted was the week when Lifestyles of the Rich

and Famous with Robin Leach premiered on American Network television, which feels like one of those perfect moments of cultural serendipity about what was going on in the US at that time. Oh my God, what a match set. Those two things are. You also mentioned the book that Tina Brown really leans into scandal at Vanity Fair. There's this one incident where she publishes very glamorous pictures of Claus von Buello who had been convicted of murdering his wife and then would be found guilty, not guilty, excuse me, at his second trial. How did that instinct shaped journalism going forward? Yeah. So Tina has a saying that lapses of taste are necessary at times. I think what she did, she brought this high, low mix to American magazine journalism.

I think magazines used to be a lot more regimented. So there were highbrow literary magazines and then there were, you know, celebrity gossip rags. And I think what Tina said was for an educated audience, the type of audience that might, you know, read the New Yorker or the New York Times, you know, they still have. an appetite for sort of these scandalous stories. And, you know, you could cover them in an intelligent way, but, you know, she kind of widened the aperture for what a certain sort of self-style like intellectual class felt was acceptable for their cultural consumption. So I think about today something like serial, the NPR, you know, true crime podcast that became like a phenomenon among the NPR set.

You know, that to me, I found the roots of that, looking back at Tina's Vanity Fair, where you would have, you know, a, you know, some tawdry scandal of a high society family, you know, where, you know, some air murders someone for their inheritance, and then you'd have a sexy celebrity profile. And then you would have, I don't know, you know, Richard Holbrook writing about American foreign policy,

or you might have like a short story by John Updike or something like that. You know, she felt like the audience could be open to all those things. There's a great moment where Robert McNeil of the McNeil-Layer News Hour, the sort of stolen, you know, PBS broadcast, you know, Tina meets him at a party in Washington. And he says, oh, I love that Madonna piece in your last issue. And she like does a double take. And he's like, well, I was reading, you know, Holbrook's essay and then I came across to the Donna feature and it was very interesting.

So this is kind of a moment where I think people were kind of letting their hair down a bit. And what she ends up doing at The New Yorker in some ways is even more transformative. When she takes over the New Yorker in 1992, it was like a scandal. Like two front page New York Times stories about a new editor-in-chief of the magazine. I would love if new editors-in-chief had front-finding. page New York Times stories, but it doesn't happen that much anymore. One note in the book, you said there's no social media, of course, in the 90s. So what would Tina Brown and her lieutenants do to make sure that everyone knew what was in

the new issue of the New Yorker? So not only was there no social media, there was no political playbook. You know, there were no morning newsletters, you know, summing up what was in the headlines. So Tina and her PR chief, Mori Pearl, devised something that they called the Hot List, where they would physically hand-deliver the advance. The New Yorker would be published. It would hit newsstands on Mondays. So they would hand-deliver on Sundays the upcoming issue with, you know, kind of a cheat sheet, like a press release.

You know, here are the stories in here. Here's what's interesting. and they would get it to the homes of every network news anchor, every booker for the today show in Good Morning America, every living president received a copy of this. They also dropped copies in the press rooms of the Senate and the House of Representatives. They had it out in Beverly Hills being dropped off in Mughal's homes. They had a England operation where like Mayfair would get issues. This would cost millions of dollars a year to physically act. actually get these issues. But the idea was Sunday was a day where you're kind of setting the news agenda for the week. So if you're, say, a booker on CBS evening news and there's like an explosive story in the New Yorker, maybe you call them. And by Monday night, you've got the writer, you know, talking up the story on CBS. It was like kind of, it feels like a Rube Goldberg machine in our kind of digital media era. But in the world of traditional media, you know, this was a way

of actually getting big scoops in front of the decision makers at these other news outlets. And the OJ Simpson coverage is a great example of this. Tina sent Jeffrey Toobin out to L.A. to try to find out what was going on with the OJ trial. And he gets an interview with Robert Shapiro and actually breaks the news about their defense strategy with Mark Furman. you have to realize in 1992, New Yorker articles would take six to 18 months to even get published in the magazine. You know, the whole idea was that a writer could go off for, you know, take as long as they wanted, write about some topic that could run any time. It had no connection to the news cycle. And Tina has to go out on a Monday and deliver a story that runs in the next week's magazine.

and it causes a sensation. I mean, he is breaking real news, and then he's out on like every network talk show and CNN and Larry King, you know, talking about it. And suddenly the New Yorker is right in the center of the news cycle. And this was like revolutionary when it happened. You write that Sineu House wanted his editors not just to publish glamorous pictures in their magazines,

but for the editors to, to be glamorous creatures themselves. What was the idea there? So I call the Condé editors influencers before influencers. So before social media, the idea was that if you were a Condi Nass editor-in-chief, your life top to bottom was a marketing campaign

for the company that you represent. So if readers in the gossip columns read about Graydon Carter, you know, showing up everywhere in a limousine and taking the Concord to Milan to, or to Paris, you know, go to the European fashion shows. And then advertisers would, you know, meet with Anna Wintour at her suite at the Ritz, where she had her three assistants running around. It all contributed to the mystique of this company, the idea that Condénais was the epitome of luxury and sophistication, and it made the readers want to have a piece of that. It made the advertisers want to put their products in front of those readers. It was essentially, on the outside, it seemed

irrational, because I have stories about editors who would, you know, book into a four-star hotel, and they would get a call from their boss saying, what the hell are you doing? Get to the St. Regis, get to the Paris Ritz. You know, if you're a cunning ass editor, that's, where you need to be staying. And they would say, well, that's going to cost us four times as much money. And they'd say, no, that's the expectation. So from the outside, it seemed completely irrational. The internal logic was that to live the lives of the kind of glamorous world that was portrayed in the magazines would actually make the magazines themselves more seductive and contribute due to the success of the company.

So for this kind of very special golden era, if you were an editor-in-chief of a Condi-Nast magazine, you live the life of the king. You've got some wonderful tales of 80s and 90s magazine excess in here. Can we list a few of our favorites? I'm happy to go first here. Condonetist editors could FedEx their luggage when they traveled for work so that they would not be burdened

with a suitcase in the airport. Another great one here is that someone every day would meet Graydon Carter at the curb when his driver pulled up at Conday headquarters. This person would carry his briefcase to his office for him, and then someone else would carry the briefcase down again at the end of the day. So my favorite story involves John Kelly, who your listeners might know as the editor chief of puck, the new media platform. And John got his start as one of Graydon Carter's assistance, really, where he

cut his, where he learned his skills. So John told me a story that this was back in 2006. He had flown to Venice, excuse me, because there was a Condi-Nas conference at the Hotel Chippriani. And this was back when Portfolio, the business magazine, was getting started. And when John arrived at Upper Red Eye, He was informed by Graydon that he had misplaced his prototype copy of portfolio. There were only like seven of them in existence. He had left it on a boat and he needed it back in a few hours. And John Kelly had to figure it out. So John Kelly is like completely jet lagged.

He goes into his hotel safe. Condé assistance would travel with thousands of euros in cash anytime they went to Europe, just cash to have on hand, you know, to smooth the experience of their boss. Kelly goes to the gondolier at the Hotel Chippriani, gives him a thousand euro bribe and says, take me to the parking lot for the boats in Venice. He goes to the, you know, he goes to whatever like the taxi parking lot is in Venice, gives another 2,000 euro bribe to the guy in charge to basically rummage through the loss found. The guy finds the magazine. He gives him another 500 euro tip, goes back, drops the magazine off of Graydon.

When I brought the story up to Graydon, he said, I have no idea what you're talking about. Like, I've never heard this before. And that's when I realized, okay, if you're Graydon Carter, you're in your hotel suite, you need this thing done. You tell your assistant, five hours later, he shows up and hands it to you. He has no idea what took, you know, what went into it. But these are like the devil wears prod of stories that really actually happened. And even talking to John Kelly about it, he knows that he was kind of living this fantasy life. But, oh, you know, those golden memories.

I mean, everyone who kind of worked there has these. It's just indelibly imprinted on their life experience. Another mind-blowing one you have in here is that Bob Gottlie, who Newhouse makes editor of the New Yorker, and then replaces with Tina Brown, was paid something like $350,000 a year for the rest of his life, which you say amounts to about a $10 million golden parachute. This is for not succeeding as editor of the New Yorker. So the defenestrations all had very different qualities to them at Conne now. Speaking of John Kelly, yes, please continue.

So, you know, Diana Vrelin is abruptly fired in 1973 from Vogue and it's kind of kicked out on, I think that was a somewhat ignominious firing. And then very famously, when Anna Wintour replaced Grace Marabella, Grace learned about her firing from Liz Smith on the five o'clock news. In fact, her husband was watching it at home and called her at her office at Condi Nass and said, Liz Smith says you're fired. Grace says, I don't know, you know, I haven't heard anything about that. And then she goes upstairs and turns out Liz Smith was correct. Now, Bob Gottlieb, He replaced William Sean at The New Yorker, and he and Cy were very, very close. You know, they both loved old Hollywood movies.

They both dressed in sort of like very, you know, slovenly clothing. And I think that Cy, no, you know, Gatley was this, like, famous great editor and edited like Joseph Heller, Catch 22 and all these, you know, famous books. And so I think, Cy, I do think Cy had a real fear of kind of. confrontation. And I think in the case of Bob Gottlieb, he felt extremely guilty about having to let him go. And so he offered him an extraordinarily generous. I mean, this sort of, by the way, we haven't, you know, sign you house in a lot of ways was like a Medici from Renaissance Florence. I mean, in a lot of ways, he was this billionaire benefactor. And we should talk about this because we have billionaire media moguls today.

We have Jeff Bezos and Jay Penske, and increasingly it feels like with David Ellison that media is becoming kind of these bibles for billionaires. But, you know, Cy Newhouse, he bankrolled this company, but he really believed in producing the best art, the best writing, the best photography, and sort of allowing these editors to kind of exercise their creative freedom. and giving them a lot of rope to do it with. And, you know, even someone told me a story that, you know, at one point, Condoness purchased Women's Wear Daily. And I think Women's Wear had written some story that was very critical of something Condé had done. And Cy said, you know what, let them do it.

Like, he kind of weirdly had this sort of beneficence to him. Now, he got rid of Bob Gottlie because the New Yorker wasn't working. It wasn't making enough money. He didn't think that it was kind of changing at a pace that he wanted. And so he was willing to kind of kick the guy out. But yes, as part of his kind of patron, you know, role, he decided to be his benefactor for the rest of his life. So that's the glamorous past of Condé. Let's talk about the grittier present and future.

We know the internet's going to come like a meteor and hit so many different. different media organizations. What did the internet take away from Kande specifically? Yeah, it's a great question. Actually, one thing when I was writing the book was, you know, show me the media company that anticipated the internet and sort of had an easy transition, right? So Kande is sort of not singing. It's not unique in struggling with it. what I think was really the sort of the lethal payload of the internet for Condé Nast was that it stripped it of exclusivity and the monopoly it had over the culture. I mean, Condé Nast was about authority. It was about we are the gatekeepers and we are going to tell you what is worth reading, what clothes are worth wearing, what countries.

countries are worth visiting. And the democratizing nature of the internet where suddenly the readers had a voice where other people could come in and express their opinions and weigh in on what was happening in the world. Kande never, it didn't, it was so built on the idea of exclusivity and authority that the idea

that readers would trust a random person you know, on Twitter, on a blog, they could not conceive of that. And this was a blind spot that, you know, took years and years and years for them to get to wrap their minds around. And it really kind of robbed Kande of really one of its just central kind of reasons to be, right? Like, I also think that the editors of these gorgeous, beautiful print magazines didn't think that readers would want to consume photography or visuals or fashion on a tiny screen, right? Or, you know, and for a while when you had dial a modem, fine.

I mean, it takes a while for an image to load. But by the mid, you know, by the early 2000s, people are increasingly consuming media on the internet. And Kahn and asked, they were so worried about the sort of power of their brands that even when they did start websites, it wasn't vogue.com, it was style.com. It wasn't gourmet.com. It was epicurious. They didn't want these online sites to cannibalize the print products that they still believed were paramount. And it took, they were so much later than even a place like TimeLife

or a place like Hearst to realize that, you know, they had to plant the flag of their brands on the World Wide Web, and there were just a lot of missed opportunities along the way. It was such a strange time, because I remember you'd log on to read a GQ feature, and it would be on men.style.com. I remember thinking, like, what the hell is that? Where's GQ the website and small things like that? And you also read, they got close a few times to million-dollar ideas on the web. Do you want to share what a few of those are?

So Deborah Needleman, who created Domino magazine, which was kind of a beloved Outs, sort of design and living magazine, you know, she came up at something called My Deco card or Deco tiles, which was basically Pinterest. It was like you could take images from around the internet and, like, compile them in a folder and you would, like, create a mood board for when you were decorating her home. And, you know, she told me, you know, she was, they would not devote resources to this. you know, she asked for a staff member to run it, wouldn't, you know, wouldn't give it to her. You know, they'd given her a car and a mortgage on her apartment, but they said, oh, we can't spare, you know, 75 grand for like a digital editor for the magazine. And, you know, for her, it was like if they had actually invested in it. And of course, there are many contingencies here, but, you know, it really was the idea of Pinterest before Pinterest was around. The other big trend that I think,

think they should have cottoned onto is e-commerce. I think Kondi Nass would have been the most natural company in the world to you read something on, you know, style.com and you want to buy the piece of clothing. Why can't you click through an affiliate link or, you know, I mean, a couple of people claimed to me that Natalie Massonet, who created Nettae, had gone to them and asked them to invest. I never quite got to the bottom of that. But there was an early, very, early in the late 90s moment where they had a sort of tie up with Neiman Marcus where yeah you could sort of buy clothes off of a Vogue website and it just kind of petered out and by the time they actually tried to do it they tried to turn style.com into an e-commerce site it was

a disaster and I think they ended up losing like $100, $200 million on it. So there were just so many ways that the company, I think it was that hubris. I think they thought of themselves as the most powerful, glamorous magazine company in the world, and they weren't willing to be humble when this new technology came around. And the one thing they do right, the one literal billion dollar ideas, they buy Reddit for $10 million in 2006. So, and which leads to this billion dollar IPO. And in a way, we talk a lot today about Alcande Nast is not doing well and, you know, they're cutting resources. You have to understand the new houses. I mean, they're holding company as a family.

I mean, they have a huge amount of money. They have giant investments in charter communications and telecom. They were up until very recently major shareholders in Warner Brothers Discovery, although they just sold about a billion dollars worth of stock. But still, I mean, and then Reddit, I mean, that was like a throwaway, right? I mean, that was Steve Newhouse, who was the younger, younger, I mean, I think he was in his 40s at that time. But he was sort of looking for tech investments and took a flyer on Reddit back when it was getting started out of Boston. And, I mean, the irony that a site like Reddit, which is the most bottom-up, low-fi, you know, unregulated kind of Wild West, would end up being the bank, you know, the provider for a place like Condé Nast is like something

that you can't make up. Last one for you, Michael. The New Yorker. David Remnick, there have been noise that he might retire sometime. He's been the editor of the New Yorker since 1998. There's been speculation to, okay, do they, you know, go the Remnick route and pick a really great writer like a Patrick Radin-Keefe type to run the magazine? Do they go get a digital impresario like Nick Thompson over at the LerMont?

Atlantic to think about the future. How does Condé Nast make a decision like that over the next few years? With great difficulty. I think Condé Nast is still bad at transitions. Now, we can mention that Anna Wintour, very conveniently for me, announced two weeks before my book came out that she was relinquishing the editor-in-chief title of American Vogue. However, my understanding is that when that news came out, She's still the global editorial director, and she's still the chief content officer, Connie Nass. And apparently she was really taken aback when all of a sudden there were like headlines around the world about Anna Wintor is gone.

So even this like small title change was kind of botched in the way that they rolled it out. So and look, by the way, a lot of people are like, why is Anna still there? I mean, she is probably one of the most powerful people in fashion. But I mean, she's 70, she's around 75 years old. They have to start some sort of succession. planning for a property is important of vote. So that brings us to David Remnick. He's been in the job since 1998. I actually thought that maybe he would have stepped down if Trump hadn't been reelected. It was like, this is the centenary year. It might have had a tidy aspect to it. But I also think he's

probably, look, he's an amazing journalist. He's an amazing reporter and his instinct for a story. I mean, you know, how could you not be in charge of a magazine during this momentous moment in history? In terms of who takes over for him, you know, David in some ways may not get enough credit for the digital transformation that the New Yorker went through. You know, they were very early on to create a paywall at a time when very few magazines had paywall. And I think the fact that that has actually led to a pretty steady revenue stream is a major. success story for the New Yorker. It's funny today looking at the company, the New Yorker and Wired, arguably, are like kind of doing really well.

They're in the news cycle. They're making money. And at a time that like Vogue and Vanity Fair are like kind of trying to figure out what's our place in this new media world. So this is a long way of avoiding your question because I don't quite know what the answer is going to be. But I think that you do need someone who has. the kind of journalistic values of the magazine.

And so I think that's why, like, a Patrick Redden-Keefe, someone who really embodies sort of the quality and the ambition of the New Yorker's journalism. But you also need someone who recognizes that, you know, this needs to be translated to an audience that is getting its information through a little rectangle in their pocket.

So you've got to get somebody who understands why the radio hour works, who, you know, I haven't seen demographics for the New Yorker's subscriber base, but it's probably a lot like the New York Times where the print readership is a lot older. And at some point, hopefully long in the future, but those print readers are going to start to die off. And I'm not sure their children are going to pick up the same print subscriptions. So, you know, that is one of the trickiest jobs in journalism to fill. And listen, I mean, I think they're going to have no shortage of talent who will seek out that position. But who they pick will really tell us a lot about how Convent Nass sees the next 10 or 15 years.

Michael Grinbaum, the book is Empire of the Elite. Buy it while an underling carries your briefcase for you. Michael, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you, Brian. Thanks so much. All right, it's time for a feature that is always glossy. That is always a mix. of high and low. It's time for David's shoemaker

guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about bulletproof superwood was do you feel lucky, plank? Today's headline comes to us from War Eagle Boise on Blue Sky. It's from those

naughty boys and girls at the economist, David. The main headline of the story was why Germans are falling out of love with beer. with beer. I want you to think of the German logger, hells.

Mm-hmm. Hells, as you ponder, what was the economist's strained pun headline? Hells are still water. Hell, hell, what the hells, hells,

hells, angels, hells. Yes. Non-Germans might still like beer. I'm going to lead you, lead you here a little bit. that non-Germans might still like beer, but Germans are out. So, hells is.

Hells is. Think of a famous quote from Sartra here. Hells. Oh, hells is, um, hells is, uh, what is that line? Hells is another, hells is, uh, hell is other. Hell is other people. Hells is other people. Hells is for other people.

Oh, yeah. That is incredibly strained and made me smile from ear to ear. I have no problem with that, yeah. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Producing magic by Isaiah Blakely. We got a very nice note, David, the other day from one of the people I invited to send us email and suggest a good idea for the press box.

So they could get a press box button and they said, I'm sorry, what are you saying at the end? And why are you saying it like that? And I said to tell them, I'm saying production magic. And I'm kind of saying it like Bill Raftery. when he calls out the defense at the beginning of a college basketball game. Yeah. They're in one-in-what. Coming up with the press box.

Football season is here. David, Joel's back on Thursday. We're going to do a college football TV preview before Lee Corsos' final edition of game day on Saturday. And speaking of which, a podcast went up yesterday, it's Kirk Herb Street,

who's been Corsos' on-air partner for 30 years talking about his friend, telling great stories, and comparing Corsos, to the legendary mouth of the South Jimmy Hart. We did have one listener, David, who figured it out. He got himself a press box button. Shoemaker, you and I will return next Tuesday, once again Tuesday, because it's Labor Day,

for more lucorm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.