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[upbeat music] I've never been referred to a part-time creator by the way. I'm gonna change my LinkedIn, part-time creator. [laughs] It's great. [laughs] Just part-time creator with Puck. You're a full-time creator.

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Yeah. Absolutely. I like it as like Miami- Just part-time with Puck... Miami-based part-time creator. It's- Sounds amazing. Every- everyone will refuse my LinkedIn requests.

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[laughs] Or maybe if I put like Bitcoin evangelist too.

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[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm your host, Brian Morrissey.

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I wanna thank you all for listening, but also if you use Apple, definitely leave a rating and a review. Helps people find the podcast, or so I'm told.

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So one of the big themes, I think, in building sustainable media businesses right now is that we're coming out of this unbundling phase that was probably personified by Sub Stack in a lot of ways.

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A lot of people broke off, but also podcasting, I think, is part of this, and the overall creator economy. But inevitably, I think the ways of making money in media are bundling and then unbundling.

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And so then we're gonna move into a rebundling phase, and I think we're in that right now because inevitably there's gonna be a middle ground that develops, and I think that's probably the most powerful part of it, though the Sub Stack phenomenon will probably remain fairly niche.

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And you see today they came out with a new app, and I think they're starting to tiptoe towards rebundling in their own way, which is gonna be pretty dangerous 'cause it, they could lose a lot of creators if they get in the way.

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Anyway, a lot of this was rehashed this past weekend in w- what else, but a Twitter fight that erupted between Taylor Lorenz and, and some of her old colleagues at The New York Times, and even her new colleagues at The Washington Post about personal brands.

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So we're gonna get into some of that today 'cause my guest is Liz Goff.

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She is a veteran of Condé Nast and a co-founder and the COO of Puck, which in the interest of full disclosure, I do work with, but I do think that Puck is one of the more interesting new media brands around.

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So Liz, welcome. Thanks, Brian. So happy to be here. So y- y- you were at Condé for a while. You'd been at, like, Pop Sugar.

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I remember talking with, with one of your partners, John Kelly, when I left Digiday, about incubating this idea that became Puck. Explain what Puck is and why it should exist now.

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Well, first, thank you again for having me, and we're very happy to have you as a, a part-time creator at Puck. We launched Puck in September 2021. I started working on it full-time at the beginning of May last year.

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John, Joe, and Max had been working on it a long time before that, and I think Puck is, at its simplest, a media brand.

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It's a new brand with creators at the center, but we are focused on telling the inside story from some of the most important parts of America.

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So for us, that's Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and Hollywood, but it's really about finding talent who want to work with us and get that story out.

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Okay, but explain why it fits into some of the trends that are going on right now. I mean, obviously, I think... I'll just go through some of the trends that I think- Yeah...

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maybe apply, but- Your, your newsletter this morning- [laughs]... set a lot of it up really well. Yeah, well, [laughs]

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I hope I don't get repetitive, but then I realize that you have to basically repeat things a lot because I actually... A very quick aside.

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I, I forget when, but I listened to some three-hour podcast, and I was trying to figure out crypto with that guy Balaji Srinivasan. And I was like, "Oh my God, this guy is seriously like Leonardo da Vinci.

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He's got all these takes- Yeah... and everything." And I was like, "I gotta hear more." And I went into a clubhouse with him, and I was like, "Well, that sounds familiar."

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And then I started reading some blog posts, and I'm like, "Oh, this is all from...

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" So basically, he just had three hours of material that he's just been [laughs] you know, rerunning different times, and that's all of us. But- Yeah...

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I think some of the big trends is this shift from institutions to individuals. As I said, it's not all or nothing. I always think things come back to the center. Obviously, there's- Yeah...

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been a shift from being ad dependent to putting subscriptions and direct revenue at the heart of business models. And then I would say the final one would be this focus on communities.

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I don't know, we need a better word for it. Yeah. But I don't think you build a, a modern media brand today that's gonna [laughs] be sustainable and not anchor it in, for lack of a better word, communities.

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Am I missing any of the big trends? Yeah. I think those are the big trends that we're thinking about. Where do you wanna start?

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So let's start with the first one, 'cause you're like, "Well, it's a media brand," but it's a media brand with a twist, right? Because I've never been referred to a part-time creator by the way.

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I'm gonna change my LinkedIn, part-time creator. [laughs] It's great. [laughs] Just part-time creator with Puck. You're a full-time creator. Yeah. Absolutely. I like it as like Miami- Just part-time with Puck...

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Miami-based part-time creator. It's- Sounds amazing. Every- everyone will refuse my LinkedIn requests. [laughs] Anyway, or maybe if I put like Bitcoin evangelist too.

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Explain how modern media brands are all going to be somewhere along this continuum between institutional brands and individual brands. I don't believe- Yeah... it's all or nothing.

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So explain how, where Puck sits on that continuum. So we agree, uh, that the middle is a very happy place, and somewhere that we, as we were building this brand and this business, I think are constantly striving to be.

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And so for us, I think when we started, it was with the very simple premise that journalists are the, one of the most original influencers in American society when you think about their societal clout and their loyal fans.

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But aside from Twitter and then Sub Stack, they were sort of the last, like, untapped group in the direct-to-consumer revolution.

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And so we really started with journalists and thinking about how do we build a business that places journalists at the center of the revenue model rather than as a cost center.

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But then at the same time, part two of what we know when we were building this was that brand still matters. I think weSaw two ends of the spectrum. We saw the totally direct-to-consumer

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indie media Substack individual brands of the world, and then at the other end were a lot of the legacy or institutional brands that a lot of the founding team at Puck had come from that have their own

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amazing benefits, but also challenges. And, and we thought that the media brand of the future is taking the best of both of those worlds, and I think that's where the, the happy middle comes into play. Yeah.

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Run through some of the benefits from the legacy/institutional side first, and then we'll move to the individual side, and then we can talk about how you guys take a little bit of both. Yeah.

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On the legacy and institutional side, at the very heart of it you have brand, right? You have trust, you have influence, you have editorial, you have ad sales, you have marketing, audience development, legal,

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like, layers of support and teams. And for a long time, really successful businesses. I think the flip side of that is that there's secular headwinds, there's high overhead, there's union challenges.

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There was years and years of cost-cutting and reinvention.

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A lot of challenges, and sometimes I think it's easier to start from scratch than to try to reinvent something that's old and, and has a lot of challenges baked in.

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And then on the other side of the spectrum with Substack, which is an incredible company and I think works really well for a lot of creators, you have kind of the opposite. There's no John Kelly at Substack.

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There's no Max Chae in our head of growth and strategy, and his team oversees all of Puck's audience development and community building, if you will. It's oftentimes single channel. You're selling your own advertising.

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As a journalist, the, the institutional support is, is not there at all, and I think for some people, that's incredible. For other creators and journalists, maybe they want the best of both of those worlds- Yeah...

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which is what we kind of call ambitiously niche brands, which is what Puck strives to be. Oh, I like that, ambitiously niche. 'Cause a lot of times niche- Ambitiously niche [laughs].

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Well, it's funny because niche now is getting... Or we can say niche, um, because we're not in Europe. [laughs] I would get mocked by Marco Bertozzi if you're listening.

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He would always mock me for slipping and saying niche when we would do events in Europe- [laughs]... because I have to say niche apparently. [laughs] Whatever. Oh my God. I'll say it however you want, Marco.

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I'm just gonna say niche. [laughs] Oh, it's very fancy. Well, you're at Conde, so it makes sense. [laughs] But no, that's a great point. And I love actually doing sales, so if anyone wants to contact me, I will sell you.

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It'll be fun. It'll be good. So get in touch. So, so will I. So uh- Bmarci@gmail.com... you can get in touch with me too. [laughs] I'll get you into a package. I believe in partnerships.

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But that's totally true, because I think that when you start to do stuff solo and you start to realize there's a ton of different functions within a publisher that is more than just creating content.

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And the only way you can really truly do those things is by spreading the cost of the infrastructure across more than one person. I can't hire a designer full-time for just me. It just makes no sense.

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But at the same time, I wrote today about the autonomy piece, and I think it's an interesting one to nail. I wo- I wonder how you guys think about this.

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'Cause I guess my theory is, and this might just be a personal thing, but it's also based on just talking with a lot of people who are still at this moment in institutional brands.

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I think a lot of, like, gripes come down to just the lack of autonomy. I feel like a lot of people focus on economics, and economics are, are important, but it's only a piece.

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This pandemic really focused a lot of people's attention on how much work took away their personal autonomy. Yeah.

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I mean, to me, it's the exciting thing about our industry, and for better or worse, we're, we're both media people, right?

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We love this industry, and it's constantly reinventing itself, and I think we're at the point now where journalistic creators have more options than they've ever had in terms of where they can create content.

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And if they're just an individual brand or if they're part of a niche brand like Puck or they're part of an institutional brand, I think it's all about each individual's, like, risk tolerance and desire for autonomy and where they wanna work and how they wanna work and do they want an editor and do they want advertising sales.

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And I'm not a journalist obviously, but it seems to me that it's a great time to figure out, you know, what works best for you and what helps you maximize your creative output. Yeah.

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The people who are part of Puck, people like Dylan Byers, Matt Belloni, they're very well-known and prominent, particularly in their focus areas.

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I would think prime to work for Substack or on an institutional level, they worked for, like, top publications. So what's the pitch? We're very lucky. Obviously, I'm highly biased, but we're really lucky at Puck.

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I think we work with the absolute best talent in the world.

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We have nine founding partners as journalists on our team, and I was very involved in pitching Dylan in particular to join the team and, and he and I have reflected on that a few times, and I think one of the big topics that we talked about was risk.

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Dylan has a couple of young kids, and my pushback and pitch was, "There's risk in staying where you are too."

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Dylan was at a big institutional brand, and there's obviously risk in building something from scratch, but we're business partners and, and we get to be creative and, and brainstorm and talk about what tools or platforms each person on our team wants and needs to continue to build their individual brands while we're building Puck.

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And I think for some people, that was an exciting prospect. Okay. So Howard Mittman and I talked about this on this podcast. It's like they get dental with upside. [laughs] That's what he called it.

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I think they get more than that.I think it's [laughs]... You know, they, we do have dental- Economist forum. The econo-... and Justworks No, but you know what I mean.

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I think a lot of times, particularly people who are not in journalism probably appreciate it, but it's a very precarious profession.

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I don't know anyone who's been in journalism for a period of time that has not suddenly lost their job. I don't know if every profession is this way. I feel like it's more acute in journalism.

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My first job lasted all of 18 months before the magazine folded [laughs] and I was- Mm-hmm... thrown out on the street.

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And I think that sort of has a, a bit of a searing effect on publishing, because you start to realize there's no safe existence in publishing.

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Maybe there are a few perches, but the great sinecures of the past are [laughs] are over. Yeah.

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I feel like with some of those situations, which obviously I've witnessed at various places in my career, it's totally out of your control.

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You can be an incredible writer and incredible talent, and it's, you know, the somebody who's controlling a P&L somewhere upstairs is deciding your fate. Yeah.

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And, um, when you're- Or someone d- or someone decided to pivot to video and you weren't asked. Yeah. [laughs] Or pivot to video. Yeah, I, I do love cats. Some cat videos are amazing, but [laughs]

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I think that when you're in an entrepreneurial environment, whether that's building a new brand or, or working on your own as an individual creator, I think you just have more of a sense of being able to control your own destiny and control- Yeah...

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the outcome and build things, which is really fun if that's what- Yeah... you like to do. Yeah. But, like, you get, like, a salary, but also you have ownership, right? I mean, 'cause I think ownership is- Yeah...

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is important. Yeah. At Puck, everybody has a salary, ownership. We do have insurance. We have Justworks- Dental... um, which is a great partner. [laughs] There is dental, there's vision. Oh, great.

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We have a 401[k] that we just launched. [laughs] You have a lot of that, but I think you also have a lot of intangible things too, right? Yeah.

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You have, as I said, you have Max Chayan and his team who are experts in audience development. Max has a one-on-one every week with every talent on our team to talk about strategies, email performance, things like that.

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I have a very small, um, team of myself and one other person who work on advertising. We just did a first dinner that Matt hosted in LA with some leaders in Hollywood.

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We have the two podcasts that we announced yesterday coming out next week. So we're just constantly brainstorming with our talent, "What do you wanna build next?"

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And our team is still really small, so we're haven't done a ton yet, but I think that all those intangible benefits of business partners and people that can help you continue to grow your personal brand is super valuable.

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[laughs] We'll get to the personal brand stuff- Mm... and the podcast in a bit. But underpinning all of this is subs, right? Because you do run ads, which I like, um, 'cause I like ads. Get in touch, by the way.

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We, we like ads too. I'd love to sell ads. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] Like, we should go out and sell some ads together. Mm.

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Because I think a lot of this, it is premised on direct reader revenue, like web 2.0, 'cause we saw a similar unbundling there with the blog era and stuff like this.

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And the big flaw to me of that era is the answer was always advertising back then.

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And so if you look at how the TechCrunches and the Mashables, like gig developed, I think it would be a little different today because simply paying for things online is just really easy now.

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And so there's definitely been a shift there. So talk to me about how you guys thought about the business model that could support this. Yeah. So I mean, we agree with you. We love ads. I do in particular.

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I've spent my whole career working in media on the business side, so I understand their importance and what they can do for our client partners as well.

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I think for us, we are approaching everything with a subscriber first mindset because people are paying for our product. And so we're really careful not to do anything just to sell it.

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But we've had some client partners that have asked, "Well, can we do a dedicated email," for example. And we're like, "Mm, not yet."

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We don't think that's something at the moment that we could create that our subscribers would find really useful or something like that.

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And so we're trying to just make every business decision based on will this benefit our subscribers or, or give them something additive to their experience.

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I think as we do think about ads, and, and we've worked with 15 different big brands since we launched in September, we love them, and I think that for us, there's a huge opportunity there as well because, like, we've created...

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The content that we're creating at Puck is attracting a, a very senior and influential audience.

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We have a very small amount of audience data, but one of the things that we do ask everybody when they sign up is what their level in their company is and what industry they work in, and one in four of our paid subscribers identify as C-suite.

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So we have this really senior, really influential audience across a lot of industries that have a lot of brands are trying to reach.

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And so we, in the era of it being harder and harder to find any consumer, let alone like a CEO online, Puck's content has resulted in all of these people raising their hand and saying, "Please come into my inbox every day."

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And so we're really focused on making great content, and then because people want to engage with the great content from our amazing talent, we're able to find brand partnerships that I think work really well for us and, and have worked well for our, the, you know, initial partners that we've worked with.

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Yeah. I love that term I, identify as C-suite. I'm gonna use that. I [laughs] I'm gonna tell people, "I'm like- You can use that... I identify as C-suite."

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[laughs] I, I feel like a lot of your advertisers probably identify as C-suite. No, that's true. A lot of the people...

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And I think that's, like, an i- interesting part of this is because if you look at the, the partners, the advertisers that, that Puck has, you're getting Facebook, you're getting, like, big advertisers and stuff, right?

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And the numbers, let's be honest, they're a lot s- smaller, I'm sure, than, like, other outlets.

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But that's why I really do believe that-Advertisers will need to get more comfortable with smaller audiences if they're looking to reach very specific groups- Yep... and very influential groups.

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You talked about this on your podcast a few weeks back with Jake Sherman, and they've built an incredible ad business because they're also reaching really senior people in Congress every day.

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And that's, you know, a very niche group that a lot of brands are looking to get in front of.

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And if you know that you have that audience, it's a big opportunity, and I think it's helping brands solve their issue too of wanting to get in front of those people. Okay, so it's not all subs, right?

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But I would guess, like, the overwhelming majority of, of revenue right now is subscription, or no? We are not sharing any, any of our- But so we're partners. Come on, Liz. [laughs] Is that what all partners do?

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But by the end of this year, we're hoping to have a pretty even split between subscription revenue and advertising revenue. Oh, really? Yeah. See, that's more of a split than I would've thought.

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So talk to me about the podcast thing, 'cause I'm not sure where the revenue comes from there, if you're selling ads or if it's a licensing deal. Yeah. We have two podcasts that we announced yesterday.

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One is a sort of relaunch of our existing podcast that's called The Powers That Be.

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Presently, it comes out once a week, and we're relaunching starting Monday in partnership with Cadence13, and that's gonna be a daily Monday to Friday podcast for 15 to 20 minutes.

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Peter Hamby is gonna be hosting it, and the rest of Puck's talent are gonna be guests based on the breaking news of the day. And we absolutely will be selling ads against that in partnership with Cadence.

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And then the other podcast that we an- announced yesterday, uh, Matt Belloni is gonna be doing with The Ringer team at Spotify, and that is super exciting. That will be specifically focused...

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It's called The Town, and that's gonna be specifically focused on the business of Hollywood.

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Matt's newsletter within Puck, What I'm Hearing, is covering the ins and outs of what's happening with executives and streaming rights and back-end payments and, and lots of things, and I think he'll be going into more detail- Yeah...

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um, in that, in the podcast, and that will be ad-supported too. Oh, okay. But that's Spotify sells those ads, or you both sell it? Uh, yes. [laughs] Spotify is selling those.

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[laughs] On Cadence, on the deal with Cadence, we're both selling. Okay. Yeah. So what other revenue streams do you expect to add, or is that, like, enough for now? [laughs] The podcasting will be a big one for us.

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We, as I said, we just last month piloted our first offline event. I have a lot of experience in events from my time at Condé. I love experiential.

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I think it's a great way to reinforce the idea of a brand and not just, like, a collection of newsletters or a collection of individual talent.

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And we hosted a, what we called a Puck private dinner that Matt and Jason Blum co-hosted. Dylan Byers was also there and about 10 other guests from the industry, and that was purely an editorial event.

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But I think we have ambitions to potentially productize that, bring C-suite leaders to the table to have an off-the-record discussion.

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I think there's certain brands and certain categories that potentially would like to support that or be a part of that conversation. We've talked about some ideas, uh, for a tentpole event later this year.

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Julia Ioffe, who's our Washington correspondent, and hopefully you've seen all over the news leading the national dialogue on the, the Russia and Ukraine crisis.

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Think we'll probably do a similar Puck private dinner sometime very soon with her. I think there's a lot of...

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We move really quickly, so when an idea pops up, if it seems good and we feel like it's viable business, it's let's go do it. Yeah.

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And so it seems like the focus is on power between whether it's New York, Washington, LA, San Francisco, for lack of a better term. I guess it's San Francisco. Whatever, wherever the tech, Miami, I don't know. Yeah.

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[laughs] It's Miami now. [laughs] No, it's San Francisco, I mean, Chicago. We have a pretty national readership, but- No, but I, I mean that sort of symbolically.

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The sort of power centers you end up thinking about these days are, like, tech, Hollywood, Washington, and then New York, which is the stand-in for media, I guess. Yeah, and Wall Street, Washington, DC.

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I think what's interesting about those different worlds of power, if you will, is that they're, in a lot of ways they're all conjoining, right? Like, tech and Hollywood are in some cases becoming one and the same.

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What we always say editorially when we're talking about the brand is that at the really top of the pyramid, all of those worlds are interconnected.

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Like, it's one room up there, and, and Puck is the narrator from that room of what's really happening in, in the country.

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And then we hope as we grow that we're expanding to the concentric circles around those people in the room. I'm not in the room.

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Uh, I aspire to be one, at one day, and I think that our writing is, has a lot of aspiration inside of it too, people that, that wanna be successful, that want to control the narrative, and it's really fun to, to write about that world and, and be part of that world.

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Yeah. And it's one of those things where you typically start at the top, but you get all the people who wanna be at the top or wanna reach the top and stuff. That's generally how- Yeah... it works, right?

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[laughs] Exactly, especially in, in the category, the, the niche area that we're playing in.

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I think that there's other brands that I've spent a ton of time in my, in past jobs working in, like, the beauty space and fashion that, and a lot of times are as mass as possible.

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It's like success is being all things to all people. Like, being a brand that's sold in a, in a pharmacy chain, like, you need to reach everybody, and Puck is, is very different.

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We're not trying to be all things to all people, and I think that gives us a lot of guidance in making business decisions as well as editorial. Yeah. So but you want people to subscribe to a bundle, right?

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The Puck bundle. It's not like people are subscribing to Peter and then they also get Puck. Or explain the dynamics there, 'cause I think it's- Yeah...

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like, interesting because a lot of times, I know, like, at Digiday, we wanted people subscribing to a bundle of content, not-So they could get access to an individual piece of content, or even we didn't have things tied to personal brands, but we didn't think about it that way.

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Yeah. I, I think that we mention the word bundle a lot internally. I think it, it's really just the value of getting this incredible writing and content from a team of elite journalists rather than just from one.

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But I think what we... When we were in pre-launch last summer, because our... As I said, we launched in September, but our talent, Matt was our first talent.

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We-- he and I actually started on the same day, like May 1st or something, 2021.

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Really quickly after each talent started, we launched a private invitation-only email newsletter, which is how each of our talents started building their followings.

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And then last August is when we actually announced Puck as a brand and announced that there would be... it would no longer be free and there would be, um, a subscription price.

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And what we were doing during that period was using each talent's, like, individual following to build interest, and then it was like, okay, great, the bundle of Puck is that you're gonna get all these writers.

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And I think what we've learned is that people are enjoying reading multiple talent.

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Like, we are-- ooh, we're still working on our, all of our data stack, but, you know, when a lot of times we're learning that somebody came in from one talent and then they realize that they're really interested in someone else, and, and we see a lot of overlap in between Julia and Matt, for example, or Julia and Teddy in Silicon Valley.

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Like, people aren't just interested in the one topic that they came for. Yeah. I think that's super critical, like, with a lot of these new models.

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And again, like, I know a lot of people, like, go crazy about these terms, but I'm sorry, they're just words. [laughs] They're just words. Uh, which is talent. They are just words. Yeah.

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I don't know why people get so upset about them. I mean, these are not like... You know, there are some very bad words that, that speak to hatred and stuff like this, but this is just, it's just words. It's just jargon.

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Eh. But talent i- is really important 'cause I think a lot of times when it comes to media, like in indirect models which are ad driven, sales... I remember my first job, which they, it went out of business.

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I remember the CEO was like, "Sales solves everything," you know, it's like cliches and stuff like this. And so the journalists then keep all the salespeople that weren't selling. [laughs] I was like, "Oh, that's weird."

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'Cause we continue to [laughs] publish stories, but they're not selling the ads, but we're the ones who are getting fired every Friday. Yeah. [laughs] Eh, strange.

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But that's because that was the model, and I think a lot of times when people are building the, the models, again, like, they sort of underestimate the importance and the difficulty of not just attracting talent, but attracting the right talent that...

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Like when you talk about concentric circles. There needs to be concentrics. There's concentric circles between, between Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby and Matt Polloni, like they're, they touch.

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They're not, like, totally different. Yeah, absolutely. It's funny your point about always cutting the journalists and, and not the salespeople.

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Like, at Puck, there are definitely more talent than there are operators, whether we're doing audience development or selling ads or doing finance or things like that.

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And so we hope that balance is talent friendly- Yes... uh, to use industry jargon. To be fair, I like salespeople. I am a s- I am a salesperson. I'm a salesperson. [laughs] So we are both salespeople. You are too.

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So I know... Listen, I, I respect sales more than probably most journalists 'cause I know how hard of a business it is.

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Reporters think getting someone on the phone to give a quote or g- uh, cough up a piece of information is hard. Try parting someone [laughs] from their money. It's harder, trust me. It is harder.

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Then it's a more creative profession than I think is given credit, particularly from the reporting side. But it is a, it's a critical role- Well, the, the talent at Puck are very supportive. Yeah, yeah.

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So one of the other things that I think is, is really interesting is getting the right size of the business, right? And so talk to me about that, um, because you are COO, and this is... Look, there's traction here.

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I think at Puck the model makes a lot of sense, but you gotta get the right size, right? Yeah. 'Cause you can't do everything.

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'Cause I think we've all seen in, in publishing businesses, I will, I would joke, I'm like, "Oh, this is a great business if you just take out a lot of the costs." [laughs] Yeah.

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[laughs] So agree, and I think that we have been super pointed in trying to keep our operating costs as low as possible since we launched.

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So obviously we invested a lot of money in talent upfront, and t- t- our business is talent, right? So there was no choice but to do that, and then otherwise we've been extremely lean.

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So Joe Perzicki, our CEO, he and I are sort of overseeing all of finance and HR and ad sales and trafficking ads. Like, we don't...

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We have a very lean team on the business side, and as we continue to grow, we'll absolutely hire people. We actually just green lit a few roles.

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I, I'm posting on LinkedIn, like, every day about, "Come join our amazing team."

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So we're at the point now where we feel like our revenue's picking up and we can make that investment in more people, but we, we don't wanna make any mistakes or make our business more expensive than it needs to be at the outset, so.

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Yeah. It's so, it's so critical 'cause I mean, you can- Yeah. Like, controlling your costs is just so... I mean, I know because, like, I send my invoice directly to you, so, and you paid really quickly for that. Yeah.

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[laughs] So many people. To those- Yeah... people out there who have not yet paid me, I'm gonna be emailing you later. Um- Yeah. I- But- Totally. I pay our invoices.

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[laughs] I write our invoices for advertisers and send them out. I traffic the ads. Like, we, we're a startup. We're j- we're super scrappy. Yeah. So the final thing is I wanna talk about this personal brand thing.

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I get it. You know, there's a lot of these terms that, you know, get thrown around, and I understand how people get grumpy about them, whether it's talent or personal brands or creator economy or whatever, right?

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But there does seem to be, like, a tension that exists, and I think it was sort of surfaced with these Twitter fights, unfortunately, over whether journalists should be personal brands. Give me your take on that.

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What's the case for the journalist as personal brand? [laughs] The whole, the term makes me laugh because I personally have been joking about personal brand management for a decade or more.

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But that's mostly just like a self-deprecating move on my part. I think that, as you said five minutes ago, these are all just words, right?

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To me, it's, uh, it doesn't matter if it's, like, a star or a personality or an influencer or a thought leader or a brand.

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I think whether you're an, an institution or an individual, if people look to you for a point of view, if people trust you, if they are expecting something from you, m- in my opinion, that makes you a brand, and it could be a big brand or it could be an individual brand.

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The term doesn't bother me. It's that, that point of expectation and trust, and that does make you a brand or insert other word here. Now, if you refer to yourself as a brand, that's, that's maybe a, a different topic.

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I- at Puck, I always talk about our talent as individual brands and that Puck is a house of brands, and we think that the two of those can coexist really well and grow together.

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But, you know, Matt and Julia and Teddy and Tina, they're not referring to themselves as brands. [laughs] I think that's it. That's what, what I tell them they are. That's... Exactly. I think it's, it's like genius.

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If someone else calls you a genius, that's fine, but calling yourself genius- [laughs]... psychopathic behavior. So that's it. [laughs] I think we solved the problem. Did we solve it? You can be a personal brand.

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Just don't call yourself a personal brand, and let someone else call you a personal brand. That's it. Yeah. I think that we, we solved it. I mean, I absolutely refer to all of our talent as brands.

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I know Taylor Lorenz personally. She's absolutely a brand. Like, she has a massive- Without a doubt... following. People look to her for opinions. Like, I- I did a podcast at Digiday for five years. Yeah.

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I had on the CEOs of every major media company that I can think of. I had Taylor on twice, and they were the top two episodes that I ever did. Oh my God. Ever. That's amazing.

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More than the CEO of the companies that she worked at. So yeah- That's amazing... she has a personal brand. Yeah, and- I can say Taylor, and you can say it. Yeah. Knock on wood, I've never been in a Twitter fight.

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Uh, the only tweets I'm- That's terrible... send... Uh, the only things I'm sending on Twitter are retweets of Puck content or content from our talent. But, you know, I think sometimes it...

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People just like to get in fights, so I- [laughs]... I think they're just words. I agree with you. [laughs] Yeah. Journalists like to be grumpy. All right, Liz. Yeah. I'm gonna leave it there. This was a lot of fun.

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I really appreciate. Thanks for having me. Like working with you guys. And thank you all- We love working with you. Oh, thank you. Thank you all for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

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Thanks to Jay Ray Sparks, who is our producer. [outro music]