When the digital-media company Puck launched, last September, it promised insider access from “elite, genre-defining journalists” to America’s centers of power—Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, and Silicon Valley. In an accompanying manifesto, Jon Kelly, its editor-in-chief and co-founder, laid out Puck’s editorial strategy and business model, which aimed to place its writers at the heart of the project, as owners of the company. Other industries had remade themselves around new “distribution streams” and the “creator economy” and, in Kelly’s estimation, “journalists, perhaps the original influencers, were due for the same transformation.” He cast Puck writers as “generationally talented,” peers of the most exalted industry leaders they were covering. What he had learned in nearly two decades as an editor—largely at Vanity Fair, with stints at Bloomberg Businessweek and at the Times Magazine—Kelly told me, “was just how much these élite journalists knew.” Yet much of their knowledge never made it to readers. Puck was designed to change that. It was built to reveal the backstory, to take readers into back rooms, and to display the back-scratching that takes place within them.
Puck sought to capitalize on the same idea driving the newsletter company Substack—that certain writers, with dedicated followings, can be their own profit centers. Puck’s writers would be featured in their own newsletters (or “private e-mails,” as Kelly likes to say), but also enjoy the scaffolding of copy-editing and story meetings. Their compensation model was at the core of Puck’s strategy. At Puck, journalists weren’t simply salaried employees. They would get an equity stake in the company and receive bonuses based on their subscriber numbers. (For every thousand subscribers they bring in, writers get ten thousand dollars.) Puck journalists, some of whom earn between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand dollars a year, refer to one another as “partners” and receive detailed briefings on the state of the business—an unusual arrangement in media, where writers typically have only a dim awareness of company balance sheets.
Puck’s tone is deliberately clubby. Part of its pitch is that its writers move in the same elevated spaces as the people whom they cover. Kelly dislikes some of the “wrist-slapping and rage in journalism” nowadays and seems put off by the effects of the democratizing forces of social media on the profession. (In one conversation, he told me that he thought sending Twitter D.M.s was “a little tacky.”) His site is meant to be more understanding of the complex problems that face the masters of the universe. Puck, Kelly said, has a “pro-success” attitude.
It ostensibly expects the same of its readers. Puck makes no attempt to conceal its yearning for a rarefied audience. When subscribing—a hundred dollars for basic yearly access, two hundred and fifty to be a member of the “Inner Circle,” which includes off-the-record conference calls with the writers themselves—you’re asked to identify your job level. C-suite, senior director, senior executive, and director are four of the seven Puck-sanctioned reader careers. I sheepishly checked “other.” Jen Psaki, Hank Paulson, Kara Swisher, and Sheryl Sandberg are all readers. One slide from the site’s pitch deck to potential advertisers features a pyramid under the banner “Puck’s audience is comprised of the most influential people in America.” The top of the pyramid is labelled Titans of Industry; the middle, Aspiring; and the bottom, Everyone Else.
Among the site’s fixations so far have been the Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O., David Zaslav (“Zaz” in Puck-speak; his domain is “Zazworld”), and headlines with “Tao” in them: “The Tao of Ari’s Abs”; “The Tao of Chuck Todd”; “The Tao of Gary”; “The Tao of Paramount.” “Ari” as in the Endeavor C.E.O., Ari Emanuel, and “Gary” as in the former Goldman Sachs president and C.O.O. and Trump economic adviser, Gary Cohn. The site’s top drivers of traffic—Matthew Belloni (who has the most subscribers), Dylan Byers, and Julia Ioffe—have all benefitted from major events that unfolded around the time of Puck’s launch. Belloni, a former entertainment lawyer and editor of the Hollywood Reporter, has focussed his efforts on the entertainment industry’s post-pandemic flux. (Twenty-five per cent of Puck’s audience is in the entertainment business, twenty per cent is in media, and ten per cent is in tech.) “People are anxiety-ridden,” Belloni told me. “They want to read about what’s going on.” Writing what Puck calls “Sun Valley—the e-mail list” is Byers, a former CNN reporter who has covered the concentric scandals that emanated from the departure of the network’s president, Jeff Zucker, and the merger of its parent company, WarnerMedia, with Discovery. (Kelly once called chatter about the cable-news network “a love language.”) Ioffe, a Moscow-born writer on Russian affairs, was hired to report on Washington, from the vantage point of a foreign correspondent. She has built up a large audience with her coverage of the war in Ukraine, writing about the mood and morale in Russia, Putin’s psychology, and the alliances and entanglements the war has brought. Her Puck readership is particularly connected, Ioffe said. “I would hear stuff about how people in the C.I.A. were reading me.”
The Puck style is authoritative and knowing. Its writers regularly refer to the moguls they cover by their first names. Their dispatches often have bits of news, but they’re also distilling the yammering going on in their specific coverage worlds. A common Puck trope is to speak of one’s phone and e-mail blowing up with sources clamoring to talk. William D. Cohan, a former mergers-and-acquisition banker—who once wrote about the “private equity prom” he flew from his home in Nantucket to attend—unpacks Wall Street deals in prose laden with EBITDA, debt-restructuring, and pearls about how the activist investor Dan Loeb “lives large (but tastefully).” The site’s politics coverage often channels the perspective of a consultant or staffer class, chronicling who’s up, who’s down, and who’s the next big figure to snipe about. Puck aims to be chatty and confiding, the conspiratorial companion to the Times’ or the Journal’s business section. In one edition of his own Saturday newsletter, Kelly wrote, “At Puck, we’re not shy about the fact that we often know the people we cover, and we happily eschew some of the stuffier conventions of journalism, like inserting banal and hollow on-the-record quotes just to prove we dropped a call, or marble-mouthed bothsidesism, or vacant euphemisms.”
The site often succeeds at capturing an insider’s perspective; some of the outlet’s subscribers told me that they can often guess the anonymous sourcing behind any given piece of coverage. “It’s a pretty sophisticated readership,” an entertainment executive told me. “Some people obviously are using them to deliver different messages, but that’s O.K.” He pointed to Byers’s coverage of Zucker’s firing from CNN. “I would just always chuckle because I could see who was speaking, but everybody kind of knows that. It’s almost kind of amusing to watch it play out.”
But Puck can also be guilty of overreach. Its promotional copy sometimes reads like they’re breaking the story of the moment—“Bill Cohan reveals what Dan Loeb wants from Disney” or “Matt Belloni reveals when the Disney board turned on Chapek”—when, in fact, they’re merely delivering what amounts to an explainer about it. “The Twitter saga is indubitably one of the stories of our time: a battle of egos, lawyers, dealmakers, accountants, rich hangers-on,” Kelly wrote in one Saturday newsletter. “It’s precisely the sort of tale you can only find at Puck.” Of course, the saga of Elon Musk and Twitter can be found in literally any major news outlet.
“I think they’ve done a very good job of carving out a voice that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Felix Salmon, the chief financial correspondent at a competing site, Axios, said. “Puck is really tacking hard into the insidery thing: ‘We are going to give you all of those juicy, gossipy, inside details that you didn’t know that you wanted.’ ” The concern, he went on, is that the reporting doesn’t always live up to hype. “You realize once you subscribe, it’s a bit like going into a V.I.P. room at a club. You’re, like, ‘Wait, after all that effort I ended up in here?’ ”
A decade ago, media startups single-mindedly chased clicks to drive advertising revenue. Puck is just one of a flotilla of new digital publications targeting specific subsets of readers—Punchbowl (Capitol Hill) and the Ankler (Hollywood) have adopted similar strategies. Puck stands out because it’s not squeamish in declaring its fixation on the rich and powerful. “Élite journalists are our influencers,” Kelly said. “And there is a chance to arbitrage the confluence of their influence and their opportunities.”
Kelly is forty, blue-eyed, and tan, with the compact frame of a suburban dad who never snacks from his kids’ plates. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey—“the idea that I live in New Jersey is still something I’m coming to terms with,” Kelly told me—and drives a Volvo. Many people who know him described him as impish or mischievous, with a sense of humor that went just up to the line and often over it. But Kelly was invariably disciplined during our conversations, even the off-the-record chats. One of Kelly’s skills is calibration, a former colleague told me. “He’s a very good salesman, and he knows who he’s selling to.” Another said, “He knows people. I think that’s part of his job—to know exactly how he needs to act.”
The seed of what would become Puck was planted at a desk outside Graydon Carter’s office when Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair. Carter himself sat behind an immense, custom-made beechwood desk shaped like a semicircle—which would later be used in an episode of “Succession.” Kelly, the son of the author John Kelly and Sheila Weller, a longtime Vanity Fair contributor, had grown up on Jane Street, in the West Village, which then “ascribed to a set of values”—bohemian, individualistic, exclusive—“that I still hold on to,” Kelly said. In middle school, he started reading the New York Observer, and later in his teen-age years, Spy magazine, the irreverent publication of culture, politics, and power that Carter co-founded in the mid-eighties. He went on to graduate from Fieldston, where he played football and baseball—“I wasn’t literary, I was a jock,” he told me—and Columbia University. “Every essay I wrote from seventh grade to my second year of college would go through a conceptual edit with my dad, and then my mother would sit at the computer with me and line-edit,” Kelly said. But he didn’t come from big-time money, at least compared with many of his Fieldston classmates. “I had a bit of Mr. Inside–Mr. Outside,” Kelly said. “I—at a very, very early age—normalized, like, ‘Oh, let me putter around my friend’s fourteen-bedroom Park Avenue apartment.’ ”
Kelly became Carter’s assistant, in 2004, at the age of twenty-one, and eventually assumed a certain status at the magazine as Carter’s mini-me. Kelly described other employees’ view of him as “He may be a kid, but you have to give him what he’s asking for—he’s Graydon’s guy.” This dynamic did not always endear him to co-workers.
Kelly carried Carter’s briefcase; ran errands in Venice; attended lots of parties; took V.I.P. reservations for the Waverly Inn, Carter’s Greenwich Village restaurant; and generally soaked up what he calls “the magazine arts.” He and Carter clicked in a familiar way. One of Kelly’s former colleagues at Vanity Fair said, “Graydon is like the prototypical boarding-school teacher who loves the rapscallion, the kid who stirs the shit.” The other former staffer said, “Especially as a man, working for a man, they had a real shorthand.” At a certain point, the former staffer went on, Kelly started to sound like Carter. “Some of the turns of phrases or the way Graydon would sign off his cards,” they said. “ ‘Hey, kiddo, good work.’ Like he was the boss.”
A contributor photograph from the June, 2007, issue captures Kelly in that era, looking like the Chuck Bass character in “Gossip Girl” in a crew-neck sweater and collared shirt, the shadow of a smirk playing across his face. A brief bio notes his “lineage” as Weller’s son and adds, “He’s considered changing his name to ‘Graydon Carter’s office.’ ”
In 2010, Kelly left Vanity Fair for Bloomberg Businessweek, where he edited its life-style section. Carter was livid. Kelly recalls him saying, “ ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Why would you leave the Yankees to play for the Blue Jays?’ ” They didn’t speak for years. “In the small crucible of that world, it was stunning that I would leave—I was the Tom Hagen person in his life,” Kelly said, referring to the consigliere character in the “Godfather” movies, played by Robert Duvall. Kelly said that he’d made up his mind to depart after a 2009 Vanity Fair staff retreat at the Carlyle Hotel, not long after the financial crash. The requirement had been to bring one big idea, and his, he said, was to “promote the print articles on the Internet.” The room seemed to hate it, and Kelly, who saw himself as more digitally oriented, soon realized that it was time to go.
After Bloomberg, he spent three years as an editor at the Times Magazine, where, amid the meetings and frenzied closes, Kelly had something of an epiphany: “Oh, my God, am I gonna do this every week for the rest of my life?” In 2015, he returned to Vanity Fair, where he took over the title’s digital-news vertical, later named the Hive. Some members of Vanity Fair’s editorial staff who resented Kelly from his first stint at the magazine resisted his return, two of them said. Carter met with staffers to issue reassurances and days later announced Kelly’s hiring.
When Carter left Vanity Fair, in 2017, Kelly stayed on under the new editor, Radhika Jones. His ambition had started to grow. Kelly had heard that Adam Mendelsohn, a communications executive who helped advise LeBron James on the launch of his SpringHill production company, was scouting for potential media investments for TPG. Kelly decided to reach out to him. “I was the aggressor in that situation,” Kelly told me. They arranged to meet in Los Angeles. “We went to one of those overpriced sushi places in a strip mall and just really saw eye to eye about what was changing, and the opportunity in giving journalists tools they needed for this new distribution era,” Kelly said. Mendelsohn, who is now a member of Puck’s board of directors, introduced Kelly to James Coulter, the co-founder of TPG, a private-equity firm with a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars in assets. Around that time, the firm was exploring the idea of purchasing Vanity Fair from Condé Nast or partnering with it on a digital venture. (Condé Nast, which also owns The New Yorker, Vogue, and many other titles, passed on those ideas.)
By then, some inside Condé Nast recalled, Kelly seemed to regularly inflate the importance of his role. Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and Condé Nast’s chief content officer, held periodic meetings for the company’s editors, across print and digital. A person outside Vanity Fair who attended those meetings said, “My recollection is he would always introduce himself as, ‘I’m Jon Kelly, the editor of the Hive at Vanity Fair,” as if it were its own publication.
Jones faced criticism during her first years at the magazine, including from inside the company. New York magazine and the Times both reported that people on the business side at Condé Nast chafed at Jones’s covers, many of which featured people of color and up-and-coming, lesser-known stars. Kelly said that a senior Condé executive pressed him to approach Wintour for a meeting about the editor-in-chief job. In a surprise move, Wintour asked Jones to join them. The meeting was brief; the three editors talked about politics, not the position.
Kelly told me that, by the time of the meeting, he was already intent on leaving. He became an adviser to TPG, working with the company on media investments and acquiring what he called “a mid-career M.B.A.” (He sprinkles business terms into conversations with the zeal of a convert—“you know, we’re an A.R.P.U. business,” he told me at one point.) Kelly met two of his co-founders, Max Tcheyan and Joe Purzycki, formerly of The Athletic and Luminary, respectively, through the firm’s match-making. The C.O.O. and co-founder Liz Gough joined on from Condé Nast. TPG is now one of the funders of Puck, along with the investment arm of Standard Industries, “the world’s largest roofing and waterproofing company,” which employs a number of former Vanity Fair staffers. “The vibe of the office feels like Vanity Fair,” Kelly told me, of Standard. “It’s beautiful; people are sharp and sophisticated. It’s just classy.”
TPG and Standard also fund Carter’s “Air Mail”—a mix of culture writing, reported features, and high-end fashion and beauty coverage—though Carter and Kelly both went out of their way to quash the idea that Carter was responsible for getting Kelly in the door with TPG. Or that he shadow-edits Puck. Carter did come up with the site’s name, though. The Puck Building, which is now owned by the Kushner family’s company, is where Carter’s Spy magazine was originally housed. And Puck’s automated e-mail persona, Fritz, was also the name of the Waverly Inn’s reservation bot.
Carter and Kelly’s relationship is complex—a teetering mille-feuille of ego and affection. People pointed me to Kelly’s remarks at an editor’s memorial service in 2021 as an example of their dynamic. Carter couldn’t attend the service but enlisted Kelly to read something he’d written. “I wanted to say a few words myself,” Kelly says, in a video of the service that can be found online. “First, as always, Graydon.”
Kelly appeared perturbed when I commented that his years at Vanity Fair seemed to loom large. “Maybe more to you—I mean, I love Vanity Fair,” he said. “I wanted to do my own thing.” But when Kelly offered a vision for his career, he couldn’t help but mention Carter. “I always thought that I was trying to be an ersatz version of my media heroes,” he said, “like Graydon, Bill Simmons, and, no joke, Kris Jenner.” To Kelly, each of them has what he called an innate ability to identify talent and to “take advantage of their superpowers.”
Every Saturday, Kelly publishes a newsletter called “The Backstory,” in which he waxes on about his conversations with a “real media player, one of those true battle axes who seem to have invisible fingerprints on almost everything”; an “informal lunch with a legendary editor . . . in the pedigree of Leo Lerman, Wallace [sic] Shawn, Graydon Carter, Sonny Mehta, Grace Mirabella, Bob Gottlieb, Anna Wintour, Art Cooper, and Tina Brown”; “kibitzing . . . with a legendary journalist in a green room at the One Hotel, overlooking the East River toward Manhattan, right in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.” The writing isn’t just peppered with blind items; it ostentatiously name-drops as well. Tina Nguyen, a politics writer at Puck, said, “I’ve made fun of him for his newsletter style for years. It’s embarrassing.”
Kelly’s current and former writers pretty much all expressed affection for him. “He seems timeless to me,” Cohan said. Byers told me that Kelly possesses the leadership qualities of the Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei and Zucker, the former CNN boss, particularly “making people feel really good and confident about themselves.” Part of his pitch to reporters was that they could write how they wanted to, or hadn’t been allowed to, at their previous employers. “I think Jon is interested in stories that are genuinely interesting,” the reporter Teddy Schleifer, who covers Silicon Valley billionaires for Puck, said. “As a consumer of news, so much stuff these days is just boring.” As an editor, Kelly can push limits. One reporter, who has worked with Kelly and likes him, told me that he was always pushing to publish, even if the reporter didn’t think that they had the on-the-record goods. “His real pitch is ‘what you really want to know is what people are going to tell you off the record.’ ” Tara Palmeri, who covers politics for Puck, said that Kelly’s mischievousness was one of the reasons she was eager to work with him. “I think he gets what gets attention and what gets people interested,” she said.
Puck writers also receive superlative-laden billing in Kelly’s Saturday newsletter. Belloni is a “peerless Hollywood expert”; Byers is a “peerless media reporter” who moves the stock market; and “peerless” Ioffe writes with “characteristic perspicacity and wit.” Kelly devoted a whole newsletter to Palmeri’s arrival at the site. Some of the staff have, for one reason or another, had trouble fitting in elsewhere. Palmeri left Politico after clashing with her colleagues. Cohan, once a Vanity Fair writer, said that, after Jones took over the magazine, his print stories started to be killed. “At the end of the day,” he said, “I’m just a late-middle-age white guy, so maybe I didn’t fit in anymore into the new gestalt of Vanity Fair.”
Nguyen, who previously worked at Politico and Vanity Fair, said she’s acutely aware that the world Puck covers is overwhelmingly white. (So is the staff; out of eleven writers, Nguyen and Baratunde Thurston, a cultural critic, are the only people of color.) But, she added, “my Vietnamese family members can sign up and read the exact same information that Warren Buffett is salivating over.” I asked Thurston about the site’s whiteness. “I’m not surprised by it, given what Puck is covering, the types of people who have been doing that coverage, and the types of people who can take a leap into a startup with the higher risk that that entails,” he said. “I hope you’re asking that of not just the founding partners but the founders.” I did. “We strive to be as diverse a company as we can, and it’s something we think about daily,” Kelly told me.
Byers, who lives in L.A., met me for lunch in New York this fall. He wore black pants and a black shirt with a few buttons undone, and his curly hair was slicked back. He said he’d been nervous at the outset that no one would pick up his calls because Puck wasn’t a mainstream outlet. But that worry had been quickly allayed. “The attention on us from the people we write about is really big,” he said. “The lines of communication are far more open than they’ve ever been at any point in my career—which is really great.”
Byers is a dogged reporter who is steeped in the business of media. He gets scoops—he broke the recent news that CNN would need to make brutal, hundred-million-dollar budget cuts. But several journalists I spoke with, none of whom wanted to be named, criticized him for, among other things, sometimes being a little too credulous of his sources and their agendas, a classic pitfall of access journalism. “Just Spoke to Sheryl…” was the headline on a June 1 piece about Sheryl Sandberg’s seemingly sudden departure from Meta. “What I am told by Sandberg herself, as well as several other reliable sources inside Menlo Park, is that there’s no dramatic backstory,” Byers wrote. In the following days, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sandberg had left amid an investigation into her use of company resources for personal matters. In October, 2021, Byers cited two sources who said that the then Disney C.E.O., Bob Chapek, had asked associates to explore the “strategic rationale” for potentially spinning off ESPN from the company. The headline and framing—”Will Disney and ESPN Consciously Uncouple?”—made the move seem imminent, and the conversations serious. But what the piece ultimately described sounded like run-of-the-mill corporate brainstorming. If the sources were looking to trial-balloon their theory, it worked; Disney’s stock price went up by two per cent. The company pushed back on Byers’s reporting, and nine months later he wrote that Chapek “has now abandoned the effort to spin off ESPN.” In November, 2021, Byers wrote that Bob Iger would temporarily extend his tenure as chairman of the board at Disney. A month later, the company announced that he would leave at the planned time. Byers followed up with an explanation about why his sources had been right at the time but were not anymore. It seemed, more than anything, that Byers was angry that the episode had given “Disney P.R. full license to rain down invective on my integrity.”
Byers told me he stands by his reporting, and Kelly defended him. “Dylan is the best media reporter in the business. These criticisms sound like sour grapes.”
Puck has acquired more than thirty thousand subscribers. Two-thirds of them are individuals or corporations and the other third are institutions, such as Princeton University. Puck’s goal is to upgrade its members from a basic subscription to one that includes off-the-record advisory calls with Puck writers for two hundred and fifty dollars a year. Belloni and Byers aren’t just reporters, Kelly told me—they’re “domain experts.” A truly engaged reader might pay to go to an off-the-record dinner, or attend a future Aspen- or Sun Valley-type event sponsored by Puck.
Puck, which raised seven million dollars from TPG and Standard Industries in its initial round of funding, is looking to close a Series B round by early next year. According to somebody close to it, Puck has been approached by about a dozen investors, and hopes to raise between fifteen million and twenty million dollars. The Times reported that Puck is aiming for a valuation of at least seventy-five million dollars. The site plans to use the investment to expand its range of coverage, among other things. A Puck for the fashion industry is one potential spinoff. Puck’s success rests on readers’—and advertisers’—continued belief that they are part of some élite set. And their willingness to pay for a certain kind of information, the sort that might help a person sitting in an assistant’s desk, or in middle management, become conversant in the gossip of the C-suite. In that way, Puck is a sort of trade publication for a privileged class of strivers.
Kelly has spent so much of his life around staggering power and wealth, able to take advantage of it but not quite run his own fingers through it. Perhaps that is why being on the inside has taken on such importance in his life and in the publication he’s founded. “I feel like he personifies Puck,” Schleifer said.
On a recent afternoon, I connected with Graydon Carter on Zoom. (Our first meeting was postponed because of Queen Elizabeth II’s death; his wife’s father worked as Her Majesty’s deputy private secretary for years.) “Some of the essential elements of a good editor are, obviously, have familiarity with the language—but also knowledge, curiosity, contacts, and energy,” Carter said, his gossamer flip of hair backlit by a massive antique map of Paris. Carter guessed that Kelly was entering his prime. “I think the sweet spot for all that to be completely activated is between the age of forty and about fifty-five. After fifty-five, the energy slides, and before forty, the knowledge and the contacts are not complete.” By that estimate, at least, now’s the time for Jon Kelly to make his fortune. ♦
