How Puck is putting creators at the center of a media brand

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Every cycle of unbundling is followed by another period of rebundling. Media is no different – just look at the streaming market. In publishing, the shift of power from institutional brands to individual brands has unfolded over the past few years, and now a period of rebundling will begin.

Puck is a seven-month-old media brand built with the institutional-individual brand continuum firmly in mind. The publication has recruited several well-known journalists to focus on American power centers in finance, tech, media, politics and entertainment.

“Puck is a media brand with creators at the center,” said Liz Gough, a former Condé Nast exec who is COO of Puck. “We are focused on telling the inside story from some of the most important parts of America: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington DC and Hollywood.”

What I’ve liked about Puck is how it’s not recreating the same old publishing model but instead bringing on its contributors – people like Dylan Byers, Julia Ioffe, Teddy Schleifer, Matt Belloni – as partners, giving them a middle ground that has the benefits of both the institutional approach and personal brand approach. (I have a deal with Puck as a contributor to license some of my writing for The Rebooting. I don’t have any financial interest in the company beyond that.)

“We saw two ends of the spectrum,” Liz said. “We saw the individual brands of the world and at the other end legacy or institutional brands that a lot of the founding team at Puck came from and have their own amazing benefits but also challenges. We thought the media brand of the future is taking the best of both of those worlds.”

In this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Liz and I discuss the idea of journalists as influencers, why subscriptions and ads work well together and power centers as an editorial lens.

Journalists as influencers

The notion of “personal brands” in journalism is, to put it mildly, a bit of a lightning rod, but Puck doesn’t shy from the concept. After all, journalists have long built reputations for their work – and looked to make money from those reputations.

“Journalists are the one of the most original influencers in American society when you think about it. They were the last untapped group in the direct-to-consumer revolution. We started thinking about how to build a business that places journalists at the center of the revenue model rather than as a cost center. But at the same time, we know brand still matters.”

No one size-fits-all-approach

I’m not a big fan of false dichotomies. There’s no one way to do anything, or one model for publishing. What I think the unbundling of publishing has done – and I give Substack a lot of credit for opening new options – is to give writers more choices about how they work. The idea that many people don’t all have the same needs and motivations doesn’t strike me as crazy – new option