The Press Box - Zaz and the NBA Rights, CNN’s Rocky Road to the Biden-Trump Debate, and the Washington Post's Embattled Publisher With Puck’s Dylan Byers

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

On the Final Edition, Bryan welcomes Dylan Byers and starts the show with a discussion about the word “defenestration" (1:20).Then they discuss the following: Dylan’s reaction to Charles Barkley���s "retirement” (2:42) What did David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery do wrong during the NBA negotiations (9:18)? CNN producing the presidential debate (15:02) William Lewis, ’Washington Post’ publisher, gets embattled (30:16). Then, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Dylan Byers Producer: Brian H. Waters  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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join us on Thursdays where these two will explain to me which Targaryen is right. Hello media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox. Brian Curtis of the ringer here along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up on the podcast, a few notes about David Zaslov and the concluding, at least I think concluding NBA rights negotiations, how CNN's fairing one week before it hosts the first Biden-Trump debate and the latest on embattled Washington Post reporter Will Lewis. All of this with today's guest host. He is Dylan Byers. He's worked at Politico.

He's worked at CNN. He's worked at NBC News. He is now on the media beat at Puck where he writes the in-the-room newsletter and breaks a ton of news that we quote on this podcast. He covers media defenestration after defenestration after defenestration. Dylan, welcome to the press podcast. It is so good to be here. I think three defenestrations is about right.

I think that was warranted. Now, was it you? Was it you or Pucketter and Chief John Kelly who introduced that word into the bloodstream? I'm going to be honest with you. It's so long ago. I don't remember. I do remember that it was introduced. The word was introduced to me by my favorite high school teacher.

And it is such a ridiculous. word that it stood out. But John, I don't know if you know John. John is sort of like a word smith. And it might have been him. I'm going to take credit, I think, for the first use of Sturman Drang. I think John gets credit for the Tao of anything, the Tao of Zaz, the Tao of Elon. But, you know, it's a, it's a creative.

It's a group process. Somebody brings the Dow of so-and-so, and somebody brings in Vulcan chess. Yeah, that's exactly right. Everyone has their contribution over a buck. Let's start by talking about the NBA rights, because you wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago called the Barclay Sweepstakes, which is the first piece I read that really sketched out what the post-turner NBA announcing rosters could look like. I want to ask you first, what did you make of Charles Barkley's quote-unquote

retirement announcement last week. I'm partial to your read on it, which I think you articulated on the last show, which is negotiating tactic. I mean, a few things can be true. I mean, it's certainly possible that he's willing to hang it up. I assume, I know he likes to gamble, but I assume he's got as much money as he needs by this point after making something like 10 to 12 million a year. But I also think that if you have another, if you have a circumstance in which the executives from NBC or Amazon or ESPN show up at his door and present him with another one of those publishers clearinghouse checks, that he's too savvy man to not say no. And I do think that, look, this is what he does. He does it better than anyone.

He is, to use another word that we like here at Puck, he is a generation. talent in that regard. And there's a reason why the ratings for the halftime show are sometimes higher than the ratings for the second or third quarter. So he's really good at this. I think the executives at every single network recognize that he's really good at this. And they're probably, I don't know if he's making 10 to 12 now, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone show up and offer him 15. And at what point do you, you know, how and why would you say no to that? There's a rule of thumb.

I mean, one person told me this one time that the only two people who have walked away from television under their own power, meaning willingly, are Johnny Carson and John Madden. It's a slight overstatement, but not that much of an overstatement. And, you know, when I could rack our brains, how many people are like, you're offering me $15 million to do something I'm really good at? I'm still capable of doing it. No thanks. I'm out of here. Well, and I would also just say that the lift, it's not that much of a lift, right? I mean, I don't want to discount what he's doing. And again, he's one of the only people who does it as well as he does.

But fundamentally, he's showing up to talk about basketball, which is a sport he knows and loves. And I have to imagine they take pretty good care of getting him to and from the studio. and that there are a lot of perks that come along with the job, you still got plenty of time to fit in all of the golf and gambling and time with the family that you want. So I don't, again, I don't, he's not, he's not that old. You know, I don't see, I think he's just too valuable to the media partners and to the NBA.

I think the overall brand of the NBA, I think he's very tied in with that. I think when people think about basketball, they think about Barclay and Shaq in that show. And I met, you know, everyone has a price. In the piece I mentioned, you talked about how Amazon might take a look at Iron Eagle and Kevin Harlan to announce their basketball coverage if and when they get it, that analysts like Dwayne Wade and Chris Paul and Grant Hill will be in demand. You also said that the idea of the entire inside the NBA crew going from one network to another was pretty.

pretty unlikely. So we can almost cross that off the list of permutations here? Yeah, I think so. And look, I mean, we're like deep out in the realm of speculation here, but it is somewhat well-informed speculation. That, when people think about what makes that show so strong, you know, we're used to saying, you know, like Chuck and Shaq and Kenny, the Jet and Ernie, but really fundamentally we're talking about. about Chuck. Perhaps a little bit we're talking about Shaq. And then I think Ernie has some commitments there. Now, I know that, you know, there's always, again, there's always a price and perhaps people can be bought up. But I think Ernie has some commitments at TNT beyond basketball that might

keep him there. And I think that, you know, from my understanding, again, it's not my opinion. This is just based off the folks I've talked to at that network, at other networks in the broader community. I don't think that Kenny is necessarily seen as an essential piece of that program. I think there are probably a lot of people on the analyst side who folks at NBC, Amazon, what have you, are already thinking, who could we pair with Barkley to make this, you know, that might make this an even more exciting show than the current iteration of what we already have? And is it too much of an investment? And is it too logistically hard to try and get all of these guys to come over en masse? So no, I think, I do think that, I know that Zaz and WBD are,

you know, keep talking about matching rights for Amazon and maybe even exercising some sort of legal action. But I do feel pretty confident that next year is going to be the last year of inside the NBA. Do you have a sense of when these negotiations are going to end? The one thing I knew, I mean, one thing that was clear to me was that we weren't going to arrive at the moment when the NBA said, here are the offers we have. And David Zazlov, you've got five days to figure out what you want to do about this. I knew we weren't going to arrive at that moment until after the finals were over. Because the last thing, even if TNT was not the media partner for the finals, the last thing you want to do, is have all of that blowing up while you're trying to close the season.

Now that the season is over, I don't know what the delay is. My colleague, John Orand, who covers the business of sports and sports media for us, you know, it's more plugged in than anyone. And I think even he is like, okay, guys, like, get it together. When is this is going to happen? And, you know, my guess is we don't, this isn't something where we have to wait until the end of the summer. I think they're going to try and get hammered out over the course of the next few weeks.

But there's no, there's no developments on that from. David Zazlov, who is the CEO and president of Warner Brothers Discovery is a person. I think a lot of sports fans have met, at least intimately during these negotiations. They've learned his catchy nickname. What kind of tenure has he had running Warner Brothers Discovery? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. You know, the only word that we use more than defenestrated is Zaz. That's true.

Look, there are different schools of thought here. And one blessing about, you know, having so many of us at Puck write about Zaz and the business from so many different angles is I think there are bulls and bears. And there is, if you're just looking at this purely through a sort of business financial Wall Street lens, he took, he merged a company that was, you know, had 55. billion dollars in debt. He's reduced the debt down to something, I think, around 39. And so you could point to that at least, and you could say that's progress. You could also think about the broader context of the media industry, which is only headed toward more consolidation. And you can say, okay, well, you have to judge David's performance based on how he's setting Warner Brothers discovery up for a future merger with NBC Universal or who knows.

The problem and the reason I would say on this spectrum that I'm a little more on the bull side, or sorry, the bear side, is that if you look at what he's done to reduce the debt, it has come at, it's required quite a bit of cutting down to the bone, to the point where he's undermining the value of the assets themselves, I would argue. So you look at, you know, you can say, okay, well, maybe the NBA, is too expensive. Maybe $2.5, $2.6 billion for an NBA package that has fewer games

than we used to be paying $1.2 billion for is not a smart business move. And maybe we'll just go by, you know, the French Open and some other sports rights and we'll try and cobble something together to sustain the carriage fees that underwrite our business. Well, you can say that, but

fundamentally, what is TNT without the NBA? And are there really any sports outside of football, obviously, that are as meaningful to the business and that can drive revenue in the future? I think a lot of people would say no, and that if he does lose the NBA, that is an unequivocal failure. I think if you look at CNN,

there have been a lot of layoffs at CNN, there's been a lot of cost cutting at CNN. It's also true that CNN has seen its ratings go down more than any of its competitors. It's endured a lot of sort of internal drama, which I tried to keep tabs on over the course of the past few years.

What an understatement, by the way that is. And it is, look, like, it's this, you know, on any given night, it's bringing in less than half a million viewers. And in the demo that advertisers care about is bringing in less than 100,000 viewers.

Mark Thompson, the CEO, has yet to articulate exactly what this new digital mobile strategy is going to be or what it's going to look like. And so in the meantime, you've got this brand

that used to be sort of synonymous with breaking news that no one goes to for breaking news anymore. So, okay, you know, and part of the failure on David's part there was, you know,

putting Chris Lichten charge for as long as he did. So you've done that, you've done that in HBO. Look, was it smart to sort of re-rebrose? grand HBO Max as Max? And could you make the argument that anyone who was going to pay for HBO was already

paying for it? And now you were trying to basically broaden the audience with more sort of populist content. Yeah, you can make that argument. And you can say, look, HBO is still pretty strong and pretty good at what it does. But even there, you can sort of say that the culture of the sort of like Richard Plepler era HBO seems somewhat diminished. And so you just look across, you know, you go here to, here to hear to hear to hear. And while you can justify a lot of these decisions based off of

reducing the debt, it's also true that it's a much more depressing company now to work at. And by the way, even as he's reducing debt, he continues to miss targets every quarter. And the stock continues to go down. And I think there's sort of this theory in the corner office at WBD, that there's going to come this day when he's reduced the debt far enough that and subscriptions grow on streaming. And all of a sudden, the stock is going to turn around and shoot back up to 30 bucks a share. And I've been hearing this argument since the day they closed the merger and it just keeps going down and down.

So the long-winded answer to your question, to sum that up, is I think, that this is pretty demonstrably been a failure so far. I don't doubt that he will find an exit. I don't doubt that he is positioning this company for a future merger, but there's been a lot of damage and destruction along the way. And I think that's particularly acute in the creative community. You've walked us right up to CNN. So let's go there. And I want to run a highlighter over those numbers you just mentioned. I'll quote from your recent piece here. Last week, CNN averaged just 485,000 viewers in primetime, roughly equivalent to the food network, and 88,000 in the 25 to 54 demo exactly equal to the Hallmark channel. So those numbers are terrible. Is that all the aftershock

and aftermath of Chris Licht, or is something else going wrong at CNN right now? Well, I mean, There's a broader macro environment, I guess, which is that fewer and fewer people are watching cable generally. And if you're people are watching cable news and outside of really the NFL and some college football, like this business is not what it once was. I think the question is, did it have to get so bad, so fast? And yes, I would attribute that to Chris Licht. Yes, I would attribute it to the broader WBD strategy. of thinking that all you needed to do to sustain the CNN business was cut costs and then sort of, you know, centralize the network editorially speaking, right? Get away from that, that sort of anti-Trump posturing in the Jeff Zucker area and go back to being sort of, you know, BBC-a-fied, C-SPamified, you know, milk-toast brand that CNN, I think, was associated with.

earlier in its history. I mean, the problem fundamentally is that this is the media business, whatever the obligations of the fourth estate are, the media business is a business. And if people aren't engaging with your product, you don't, it doesn't matter. I mean, because we've gotten to the point now where, like I said, even it used to be that something big would happen, a riot or a bomb or an election, and people would come to CNN. And at least CNN was asserting its value proposition as the place to go when news breaks. And then the hard thing to figure out was how do you keep people there?

And the problem now is that even when the news breaks, people don't go there. I mean, the idea that you would have the Trump verdict come down and CNN would not just blow the competition out of the water on a massive historic event like that would have been crazy to anyone who ran the network prior to Chris Lake. And so, yes, I think that the damage here was, there's no way you're going to reverse the inexorable decline of the television business. But could you have at least created the kind of programming and invested in the kind of programming to sustain the business longer and certainly long enough so that by the time you actually stood up

a viable digital business, you had this existing audience and you had this existing brand awareness and people thought about CNN as synonymous with news the way they used to rather than this network out there that absolutely nobody watches. CNN's going to host the first Biden-Trump debate one week from today, at least the first debate of this cycle, CNN becoming a media entity that Trump and Biden could both embrace, if only for one night, is something of an accomplishment? That's true. What was their pitch to the campaigns in order to get that first debate?

Well, this is, I mean, this is an area, and by the way, we should say, like, yes, on the night of the debate, CNN will do bafo ratings. I mean, it will be massive. And then, mark my words, they will run. into the same problem, which is that maybe not the morning after, because everyone will have left their TV, you know, their channels tuned to CNN. But certainly the week after, they will, everything will come back down to Earth and they will have the same big picture existential problems that they've been facing for years. But good on them for having that debate. And the way

they got the debate is, yes, like, look at the media environment right now. If you're going to do a debate, you need a television network that has the institutional knowledge and the infrastructure to put on a show like this and do it in a responsible fashion. And CNN is one of the rare networks that can do it. Obviously, you're not going to go with MSNBC, and obviously you're not going to go with Fox. And despite how much has changed at CNN over the last few years, it's also true that there are a lot of people still there who have very, very close relationship with the campaigns, with the parties, and we're able to get in the room and say,

no one is going to do this more responsibly than us, and no one knows how to do this better than we do. And there are. There are people at CNN who have been doing this for decades. And so for that one night in this presidential cycle, and then maybe if they can get their act together for a few nights in November, CNN will be will be like the focal point

of the nation. But that's not a long-term fix to their problems. They're going to produce the debate next week, but other networks, so NBC, ABC, Fox News, everybody can simulcast the debate.

So essentially this is like a branding exercise for CNN rather than exclusive programming. Yeah, that's right. The CNN president, presidential debate. So that's the idea. We'll watch this and go, CNN, I want to watch more of this network,

no matter where I'm actually watching the debate from. Yeah, I think one thing is, you know, I think they underestimate how much, especially younger folks just don't, don't have that sort of sense of brand affiliation. Right? It's not like, oh, I was watching NBC, but it was the CNN debate.

So I'm going to, first of all, I'm going to stop looking at TikTok. and I'm going to go back to watching TV like my parents did, and I'm going to change the channel and go to CNN. I mean, nope, they don't, it's not, it's not how it works. But on the other hand, there's such a massively important debate in a massively important election cycle that had CNN tried to make this exclusive for the sake of their business, I think they would have been raked over the coals.

because every presidential cycle up until this point, presidential debates happen across networks. So, you know, I don't know. I don't know of 90 minutes with Jake and Dana trying to moderate Trump and Biden is going to, you know, create a whole bunch of new lead subscribers for CNN. But maybe. Good luck to them. You mentioned CNN trying to transform into a digital,

company, which is the fate of all cable networks right now. What does a successful digital CNN look like? This is a really good question. This is really hard. And this is why I think that it's taking Mark Thompson so long. So Mark Thompson was the CEO of the New York Times when the New York Times recreated itself into what I think we would now call a success story. in a business that doesn't have a whole lot of them, right? They've got 10 million digital subscribers, and they are sort of the lifestyle brand for, you know, for, I guess,

the well-educated urban elite and yuppies and whatnot. And that's a different kind of business, though, right? And if you can create New York, if you have New York Times style journalism and then you can layer on, you know, cooking and games and all that fun, stuff and you got good podcasts and you have that sort of sensibility, you can get 10 million or probably eventually 15 million people to shell out more than 100 bucks a month and pay for that.

When you're talking about CNN, it's something that is so much more mass market and not necessarily targeting an audience that is comfortable with paying for their news on a monthly subscriber basis. So what does success look like? It's very hard. I know they're going to stand up subscription verticals and they're going to, you know, sort of along the same principles. Like you've got a climate vertical or a health vertical. And ideally you've got to, you bring in as many people as you can for free. And then as people go deeper and deeper into the experience, you try and charge them somewhere along the line. I'm just not convinced yet that there are enough people out there who are going to pay, a monthly basis or an annual basis for access to very generalized content and that that is going to fill the hole that will be left when they lose the carriage fees from television that are really what's sustained their business. When they say, you know, we made $750 million, 800 million last year, the vast majority of that is coming from the television side. So you can't fill that by trying to, you know, charge people five bucks a month to, you know, get, I don't know, Sanjay Gupta's, you know, health and wellness advice. I just don't see that happening. And so I think that's going to prove to be a really, really big challenge for them. Yeah, part of the challenge is that their homepage is the dog's breakfast. I mean, it's worse than the messenger. It's terrible. It's like, it's terrible. Can I give you three headlines that ran consecutively today before we got on this call?

Number one, if Dolly Parton can be canceled, we're in serious trouble. It's headline one. This is at the top of the home page, too. It's real. Number two, 102-year-old Holocaust survivor is Vogue Germany's cover star. These are all genuine headlines. Number three, Dr. Sanjay Gupta reveals surprising tips to prevent Alzheimer's. Who in the hell is that for?

Well, right. And whoever, it's so, I mean, it feels so, like it belongs to the internet of a decade and a half, like this clickbait internet, which is entirely geared toward people who are definitely not paying for that content at all. And it is so, it's so, I don't know, it's indistinguishable from the schlock that you find everywhere else on the internet. So why does CNN need to be in that game when like countless, nameless sites are aggregating that sort of content doing the same thing? That's really the question. Like, what is CNN? What is the identity of CNN? And who is the kind of person who is a CNN person?

I mean, I don't want to oversimplify things, but there is, you know, there is this sort of, you can judge some news organizations or any brands based off like, Do people want to carry the tote bat or would people want to put that hat on and, you know, go out in public? And CNN is just not, CNN is almost for so long has almost been seen as a sort of commodity, right? Like you can't, you can't charge people to get access to, you know, the coverage of like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You can't charge people yet, you know, be able to see the live footage from the capital riot. So what is this sort of identity? what was the kind of person you're going after that you are also going to be able to charge.

And Dr. Sanjay Gupta's like advice for Alzheimer's is not is not monetizable content. And that was the most monetizable of those three headlines. No, you're right. I mean, those are unbelievable. But by the way, you know, another thing, sorry, I'll get off my TED talk here, but like what I understand that change takes a lot of time.

And one thing that Mark Thompson, and every new media executive always says is, you know, I need time. And in Mark Thompson's case, he's not asking for six months. He's asking for like several years to make this change happen. But again, in the meantime, you have to, you have to take, you have to tend to your garden and take care of the existing product so that it doesn't become the sort of laughing stock of the industry. And I think right now when people say, okay, you're building something for the first. future. We don't know what it is yet, but you're building it. Great. What do you have now? You have a very lucrative television channel that no one is watching, and you've pretty much given up trying to compete in most hours. You stop doing a morning show. You really haven't taken care of prime time. You've got that core group of like Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, and I think Caitlin Conn's has gotten much better at her job, too. But by and large, like CNN, like no one cares.

And then you look at this at your website. And, you know, Sandin is a very powerful website that at least up until recently was like the number one most visited news site in the world, even if no one stuck around all that long. And you look at it and it is a dog's breakfast. Do you not want to at least at some point over the first, I think it's been like eight months now, do you not want to just throw a bone to your staff and say, hey, we're actually trying here. We're just going to clean this up a little bit. just so that the morale doesn't, you know, sink any further than it already has. I like your tote bag test, and I hope to see that in a puck headline soon. Does Pressbox have a tote bag?

Because I would take that straight to the farmer's market. Oh, my God. We can at least print one. But, you know, thinking about CNN, like Anderson Cooper, that's a tote bag somebody would carry around. Jake Tapper's probably a tote bag. And I'm going through the whole. roster and that's probably the number of tote bags I can come up with. Yeah.

Obviously Anthony Borgand back in the day. Yeah. You know what I would do? You know in the 90s, the shirts that were like wolves howling at the moon? You know, just like covered in from like there's no, it's just like massive wolves. I would just do three wolf blitzers. I would, that's a shirt that I would, that I would rock. This is like the ironic t-shirt, but about wolf blitzer.

Yeah. It's like those movie where they have the sort of autour directors but rendered as a heavy metal band. Yeah, exactly. That's right. We'll submit that idea. Let's talk about the Washington Post. Another subject near and dear to your heart. I feel we've hit all of Dylan's greatest hits today in order. Yeah, this is, yeah, ghosts of past, present and future. This is awesome. So Will Lewis, the publisher of the Post, has entered the state of being that we can safely call embattled. Yes.

In your piece yesterday, you use the phrase mushroom. drooming dreadscape, which I liked quite a lot. For people who have not followed the Will Lewis story blow by blow, how did he become in battle? Oh, yeah. Well, let's see if I can do this in the quick way. He showed up with a different sort of sensibility than I think the sort of very self-serious journalists of the Washington Post were used to.

He showed up with his sort of British swagger and fleets. street style. And he basically told them that their business was doing terribly and that no one was reading their stuff. And that was probably a hard pill to swallow. But I do think, you know, post-journalists are by and large pretty smart people. And I think they understand and they've had a front row seat to the fact that the business that was really humming in the Trump years has since fallen off. But the statistics were pretty alarming, right? I mean, they've lost 50% of their audience since 2020. Last year, they lost $77 million.

And that's not Jeff Bezos, despite having all the money in the world. That's not what he wants his businesses to look like. That was, so that sort of set the tone. And then, as part of his plan to bring in one of his longtime colleagues from England, he effectively tried to demote the existing editor-in-chief by giving her a role overseeing a sort of third newsroom. That was where they hoped to sort of expand the audience with lifestyle journalism and service journalism and journalism tailored to social media, not the serious Pulitzer Prize-winning politics policy investigative stuff that someone who is running, someone who is running, the Washington Post newsroom sort of pride themselves on. That did not go according to plan.

She left and on her way out the door, basically her or folks sympathetic to her kicked up this shitstorm of allegations about Will Lewis's ethics. So there was he had helped in a previous life he had helped Rupert Murdoch try and clean up after the phone hacking scandal. And there are new accusations that he actually deleted evidence for Rupert Murdoch, and there was this story about how the post was going to publish a story, and Will Lewis tried to get Sally Busby not to run the story. And then David Fulkenflick at NPR said Will Lewis had tried to get him not to run a story about this. And then all of the sort of dirt from the UK, from his days at the Telegraph and his days in the early days in the Murdoch Empire,

sort of everything that everyone back in England already knows sort of became a big story over here. And basically cast Will Lewis as a guy who has been sort of unethical in his journalism throughout his history. And now how we arrive at embattled or beleaguered is because the newsroom, which is like the Washington Post Newsroom, is filled with a lot of journalists who take a great deal of pride in what they do and see it not just as a vocation, but as a sort of higher calling,

have serious questions about his ethics and about whether or not he's the right person to lead the Washington Post. And that is sort of the where we find ourselves today with the caveat that as of now, as of you and I talking, Jeff Bezos still seems to be standing behind Will Lewis, and I think Will Lewis does believe that he can get through this and that he can win the newsroom back. This is the memo from the owner the other day. You read that as a show of support for Will Lewis. Yes, I do read that as a show of support for Willis. And I know there are other folks on the media beat out there who do not, because it is not the full-throated, you know, Willis. a great guy, he's my guy, I'm behind him all the way. Look, there are now at this point to go back

to talk about embattled, not only is the New York Times and Politico and everyone else now trying to figure out what dirt there is on Will Lewis. The Washington Post itself has brought back its former managing editor who left last year and put him in charge of an investigation into Will Lewis. So everybody right now is out there probably calling the lawyers in England to have this lawsuit out there for Prince Harry and Hugh Grant basically saying what more dirt is there on this guy?

Now, I think Jeff Bezos was aware of a lot of that when he hired him. I mean, this is not like this a lot of this again was previously known and I have to imagine somewhere between the interview process and the recruiting firm that looked into Will Lewis

these things came up and they were discussed. And I think the question is is this a, is Will Lewis really a bad dude? Or is this, is, is, is he sort of, um, does he represent a certain kind of journalism that, that, again, that Fleet Street English journalism, which maybe is a little fuzzier with the ethics. And was that his past life and are we willing to move on? And one thing is, this, it's not as though Will Lewis just showed up here and we

didn't know enough about his past. I mean, he was the CEO and publisher of the Wall Street Journal for six years before he did this. And it was a pretty successful tenure. He's been on the board of the Associated Press. He is sort of more of a known quantity than I think people who feel like they're learning all of this new stuff, you know, care to acknowledge. And I think that Jeff Bezos is in the Greek islands on a yacht that cost him twice as much as it cost him to buy the Washington Post. And he's probably thinking to himself, I like this guy. I believe in his strategy to fix the paper. And I'm not going to jettison my plan for the future of the Washington Post and the horse I've bet on to do it because the newsroom is feeling angsty about things he might have done 15 or 20.

years ago. And that might be a hard pill for folks in the post to swallow. But short of some revelation that's an actual kill shot, that's like, yeah, he, he's, you know, a photo of him, like, you know, burning documents. I just, I don't think that Jeff Bezos is willing to start from square one here. I think it took him a lot of time to find Will Lewis. I think he likes Will Lewis. I think probably if he got him down to it, he would say that he thinks the Post newsroom is being just a little too sensitive here and that it's time to actually move on and focus on the issue at hand, which is getting the Post in the black and bringing in readers. He doesn't, the Post has 2.5 million paying subscribers.

He's not, Bezos isn't working on getting the $3 million. He said he wants to get to $100. So the Post is going to become a very different business. and he believes that Will Lewis is the guy to do it. Do you know what Lewis himself makes of the situation he finds himself in? Here's my read. My read would be that, well, yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, it was actually on full display. So right after he, right after Sally Busby, the former editor-in-chief, you know, resigned instead of sort of accepting the demotion,

he had this meeting and he sort of lost his patience and all of that sort of you know he came in as as a new CEO of a company does and he said all the right things and he tried to make everybody feel good but then he lost his patience and he said like I can't sugarcoat this for you anymore no one is reading your stuff and I think his feeling and I think it's actually the feeling probably of many executives in the media world is that you guys are you guys are too precious and short-sighted and the the you know I'm happy you've won Pulitzer's I'm happy that you're out there doing great journalism but if we don't figure out how to actually turn this into a robust business with a very engaged readership something that is at least you know you know at least halfway towards what the New York Times has built, then we are not going to have a business to run. And Bezos, despite his billions, is not going to subsidize failure. And so we, you know, I think, I think that's part one, I think about how he feels. I think part two is he probably recognizes that

American journalism, American media is very different from, from Fleet Street, and he misjudged it. He played it wrong. And that actually catering to your staff and making your staff feel good is part of what the leadership entails. And there's a piece in the Atlantic, which I really love. I've been like sort of evangelical about how much I love this piece about the difference between American newsrooms and British newsrooms. And there's a sense in British newsrooms that like the guy at the top calls the shots. And if you don't like it, you go out to the pub and you bitch about it over a beer. But in American newsrooms, if you don't like it, you go to a town hall and you announce it or you tweet about how much you're, how upset you are with your,

with your leadership. And that's a very different climate than the one that I think Will Lewis grew up in. And I think he's, he's sort of having to learn that now, um, in order to sort of win back the trust and the faith of the newsroom. But I would add to that. is if he wants to be the teller of uncomfortable truths about the Washington Post, a.k.a. no one is reading your stuff. It's a little strange to insist that we all be candid, but then he's not candid about his past in the UK. Oh, I think that's totally right. Right. Because we've now got three instances, at least according to Fulkenflik, where he discouraged reporting about himself in the Washington

Post, including one before he actually became the publisher. We've got, as you say, the alleged horse trading trying to horse trade an interview to folk and flick for that. It's just strange to me to be like, okay, we're doing Project Cander here, but Project Cander ends when we get to me and my history and journalism. Yeah, I think you're actually right, right. Transparency for the and not for me. Like, I think that's right. I think what I'm afraid of is that partly because of that, because clearly he's got some

stuff he doesn't want to talk about, and he hasn't wanted to talk about it since day one. And partly because of how just all of the drama now at the post, I think he's going to abandon candor. And he is going to become a lot more diplomatic and strategic and PR approved in the way that he engages with the office. And I, for one, think that's a terrible thing, Because I actually think the most refreshing thing that any media executive has said in the last decade was, I can't sugarcoat it anymore. No one is reading your stuff. And we need to get serious about this. But you're right.

Like, you know, you can't, you can't come in with, you know, demanding more candor and not be willing to address some of the outlying issues from his past that obviously are troubling the newsroom. I think at some point, what's going to happen here is if Jeff Bezos does continue to stand behind Will Lewis and give him carte blanche to do what he wants within, you know, he has to be ethical and upstanding, etc. There are going to be some people at the post who are going to either going to have to get on board or quit. And I think at the end of the day, the media landscape being what it is, I think a lot of people are going to just find themselves having to get on board begrudgingly. wise. Yeah, I saw David Marinus writing about this on Facebook last night. That's the latest post to go public with his, uh, yeah, his unhappiness about management. A few people asked about this on Twitter listeners. So I wanted to give you just a chance to say this. You interviewed Louis May about his plans. He did not offer you the kind of deal that Fulkenflict says Lewis offered

to him. No. No. Someone, I think Politico and someone else asked me about that. No, of course not. But it was really fun to see people on Twitter just sort of assume that if he had tried to broker that deal with Folken Flick, and then I had an interview with him that I must have also agreed to deal. No, I would never agree to a deal like that, ever with anyone. And I would also just say that to the point about me writing a great deal about certain people, like I broke the news that Will Lewis was one of the finalists for this position, and then I broke the news that he was going to get the job. So I'm sort of a dog with a bone on this story. So it's not, you know, it's like, I, I would like to think that it would have been a failure if I did not have one of the early events with Will Lewis.

But no, that that's not ever something that I have done or would do, nor I should say, for Lewis's sake, nor did he like, suggest that there was it was never part of the discussion you said here as we talk on thursday morning you think will lewis is going to be the publisher of the washington post at least you know minus some extraordinary photograph of him burning documents do we still think that rob winette who's currently at the telegraph and has picked to be the next guy to run the post number one newsroom i guess you call it do we still think he is likely to become to take that job i think he's less like i think one that's happened now is you have a lot of people in the newsroom who are saying,

I might still be able to work with Will, but I really, really don't want to work with Rob Winnet, whose nickname in the UK is Ratboy, which sounds terrible, but it's meant as a term of endearment. It's a compliment for just how doggedly he chases scoops. But no,

the post-zone reporting into Winnet, I think has all of these people that he sort of worked with his private eye, you know, to surreptitiously, you know, gain access to information or to early copies of Tony Blair's book through, you know, dishonest means. I think there are a lot of people like the stench of Fleet Street that all these post-journalists fear. I think they've really put that on to Rob Winnett. Now, my own reporting, what I'll say is every UK. media executive I talked to, or a UK journalist I talked to, says that Rob Winnett is like one of the best in the business and that he's a lovely guy. And so I don't know what the calculation is going to be for Will Lewis, which is, do I actually bring over the guy I want, who I think is right for the job

and try to force that through? Or have things gotten so bad here that I need to at least extend the olive branch? And the advantage that he has, if he doesn't bring over Winnett, is that he has Matt Murray, the former Wall Street Journal editor, who's already in the newsroom doing the job that Winette is ostensibly to take over. So I don't know. I wish I could say one way or the other. The truth is, I don't know. I think that, you know, I think Will Lewis would really like to bring him over. And I think that that is still a possibility. I think right, I think there are going to be a few weeks of sort of trying to gauge how tenable this situation is and what what it's going to take to get the newsroom to calm down a little bit. Before you go, I wanted to ask you one bigger question

about the Washington Post because as you point out, the economic situation there is very real. 77 million in losses last year, 50% of their readership since 2020 walked out the door. is should the plan be to try to claw back some of that political readership that walked away from the post and founded Politico and then went on to found from there punchbowl and puck and et cetera, et cetera, or should they be doing something else? You know, I think, well, I think what they're going to do is sort of a both and. I think they're going to try to really win on those core areas that they have a both. always tried to win on, which are politics, policy, investigations. And that is going to be geared toward a core readership that maybe, you know, let's say Trump gets reelected, that maybe still has some more room to grow, or could at least get back to north of three million paying

subscribers. Then there is the larger question of appealing to that broader audience, and which is going, you know, they're going to do more in local for the DC market. They're going to do more of this sort of social media journalism. They're going to have micro payments where you can drop in and pay, I don't know what it's going to be, let's say 49 cents or a quarter or a dollar, to be able to read an article or engage with video. And they're basically just going to try and widen the top of the funnel as much as they can to make the post more relevant. They've got a huge marketing campaign coming. I think they're just trying to get the post back on people's radar. And then once people are actually going to the site again and actually spending time there,

they'll figure out how to monetize it along the way. What should they, like what would be the right course of action? I think that you have to, I think being known for politics and policy coverage is really, and trying to make that your differentiator is really hard because so many people are doing it. No one owns the hill like Punchball. Politico's got the huge policy arm and they're they charge heavily for it and they do really well with it. If you even want to think about sort of global politics, you've got Axel Springer, which took over Politico and they've got a presence in Europe. So and then, you know, there's like the, it's like the New York Times is constantly encroaching on the Washington Post's turf. So it's a really hard, how do you differentiate yourself

if the thing that you think you do so, that you're so good at, is the thing everyone else is doing. It would have been easier if you take the Los Angeles Times. Like the Los Angeles Times could have just been like, we are a Hollywood industry, L.A., deep on that, and we are foregoing national and international coverage. And maybe you could have built something like that. But for the Post, it's hard because what's local for them is national for everybody else. So it's going to be really, it's going to be really, really challenging. for them.

But at least they're thinking about how to solve these problems. It really is. And when you talk about the additional step of getting out your wallet and buying a subscription to the Washington Post, you know, there's a great group of people out there that are like, I'm interested in politics. I don't know if I want to pay for it or not.

Oh, wait, here's a free product, Politico that will give me, you know, 90% of what I want. Okay. Yes. like it's just like you know so you're going to then you're going to pay to get that last 10

percent i'm not trying to disparage the post at all because they've got they do a great job but it's like there's a lot of people out there who are just like i'm just not going to i'm not going to do that well and to your point earlier but you know there are people who are going to watch the cnn presidential debate on fox or on ABC or on like there's so many the post you know the post prides itself on oh we got this scoop out of the biden white house five minutes before the new york Times did. Well, it doesn't matter if the 10 million people who pay to read the New York Times are reading that news on the New York Times because they don't care about that five-minute difference or if it's getting aggregated in political playbook the next morning.

The business has to be something that is so distinct and so people have such an affinity for it or that they're getting something they can't get anywhere else or there's at least the perception that this is where they want to be getting it from. And that is Will's big challenge. Yeah, it's got to be a tote bag to bring it around. I'm kind of kidding, but I'm kind of not, right? It has to mean something to you that's different from just reading that news five minutes before it's aggregated everywhere else. It really does. I'm telling you, the tote bag litmus test is a really, it tells you a lot about the endurance of the business. We've done some good work here. Dylan Byers, read him a puck, read his newsletter in the room. Dylan, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Thank you for having me. This was a real pleasure. I really appreciate it. All right. It's time for the second weekly edition. David Shoemaker guest is the strained pun headline. Yeah.

Monday's headline. That was good. That was good. You seemed a little down about the whole thing on Monday. Monday's headline about a ruined grape harvest in the Willamette Valley was where there's smoke, there's ire. Today's headline comes to us from Jim Wright, not the late speaker of the house from Fort Worth valued listener Jim Wright. It's from the Chicago Sun Times, David. The trade deadline's coming up in baseball, and even the terrible White Sox have some players that other teams want.

I'm not sure if the idea here is tanking even further, but it's getting value for the players you've got. And you should know that the White Sox GM, who is going to be masterminding the trade deadline stuff, is named Chris gets Chris gets what was the Chicago Sun Times as strained pun headline

um like they're just gonna even though they're bad they can they're gonna they have desire to let's just let's just say Chris gets at the trade deadline can't always gets what you want you can uh

get um gets uh we gotta make we gotta make some trades, David. Swap. Yeah, it gets, um, God,

I've got to make, we got to make some trades, man. Deal. Yeah. Uh-huh. There, there's a word that's,

gets make a deal. Gets make a deal is the headline over the Chicago sometimes. That's nice. All right. It's actually gets comma, make a deal. Oh,

it's imploring him. All right. That is the press fox. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic. By Brian. waters. We've got some scheduling news here. Monday, our old pal Jason Gay is going to be sitting in for David. He took his son to game five of the NBA finals to see the Celtics. So he'll join

us for our very special parent corner press box edition. And then next Friday, a day later than normal, we're going to do a two-part press box. At the top, Semaphores, Benji Sarland is going to do the entire Joe Biden Donald Trump debate post-game with us. us. See how that turns out. And then I hope to have a very fun long interview with a veteran journalist, shall we say, with some stories from the campaign trail. And you know, there will be lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.