Puck은 인플루언서 시대에 맞춰 뉴스 비즈니스를 재창조할 수 있을까요?

Today, I’m talking with Sarah Personette, CEO of Puck, which is a fancy new media company that’s been around for just about five years now. Puck hires big stars and gives them newsletters that are all mostly part of a subscription bundle. These newsletters are often must-reads in their categories — everyone in Hollywood reads Puck’s Matt Belloni, for instance. Those reporters then get equity in Puck and a share of the company’s revenue. The idea is to combine the financial incentives of the influencer economy with the rigor of old-school journalism — you’ll hear Sarah say journalists were the original influencers, which is Puck’s catchphrase. Decoder listeners know that I have a lot of questions about that, and how it all fits into the modern media landscape. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. The creator and influencer economy works very differently than journalism does. If you take a high-level look at the business of most creators, they all kind of look like little ad agencies, doing brand deals and negotiating rates in a way that has always felt incompatible with journalism, at least to me. I don’t begrudge anyone this reality; that’s where the money is, especially since the big platforms that distribute content tend to pay very little for it, if they pay anything at all. And since the biggest audiences are on the platforms, finding a way to bridge the gap is basically the challenge in media — how do you find new readers who are willing to pay without accidentally giving your work away for free on platforms that don’t seem to value it very much? I’ve had versions of this conversation with a lot of media people over the years: everyone from the CEO of The New York Times and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal to streaming service executives, digital media folks, and, of course, a bunch of creators. Usually these conversations are pretty loose and pretty fun, because, well, I’m also in the media, and we all have this same basic problem. I was hoping to get a fresh view from Sarah, because before she became CEO of Puck, she spent a long time working first for Facebook and then for Twitter. So I really wanted to get into all that with Sarah, and I asked her a lot of questions about it. I have to admit, though: I’m not sure I got the answers I was looking for. Have a listen, and let us know what you think. We really do read all the emails. Okay: Puck CEO Sarah Personette. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Sarah Personette, you’re the CEO of Puck. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you, Nilay. What a pleasure to be here. I’m really excited to talk to you. I have a million thoughts about the creator economy and journalism and the information ecosystem. You’re a fascinating person to talk to about all that, because you worked at the big platforms — Twitter and Facebook — and now you’re at Puck, which is a media company that has an interesting perspective on being integrated with the creator and influencer world. I just want to start at the start. You’ve been the CEO at Puck for a little over two years now? Correct. About two and a half. Before that, again, you were at Facebook and Twitter during some periods of pretty rapid change there. You spent a minute at Refinery 29. Quickly describe your experiences at the platform companies. Very different actually. When I first started at Facebook, that was back in around 2009, 2010. And so the company was around 1,000 people. And even though that sounds like a large company, it actually was more of a startup and operated with a startup mentality. You used to hear Mark Zuckerberg say a lot, “Move fast and break things.” Then fast-forward three or four years post-IPO, it was, “Move fast and build good infrastructure.” Just even in that small amount of time, seeing the maturation of the company, the growth of the company, it moved from being a singular big blue app to also being a family of apps and services. We had acquired Instagram, and we had to integrate that appropriately. We spun out Messenger into a singular application. We acquired WhatsApp. We acquired Atlas and used that as our measurement tool and foundation. And then with that, you also had this massive technological shift, which is really applicable, I think, to the rise of the creator economy and the impact on publishers and media companies that I know we’ll get into. But during the time that I was at Facebook, which was over about an eight-year period, we also had the shift from desktop to mobile. That was a really profound technological change that had an impact, certainly on employees and the way that the company was run, and it also had a significant impact on the way that businesses operated, the way that they became mobile-first, the way that they interacted and communicated with consumers in a totally new and direct-to-consumer way. That was