Can Puck’s CEO reinvent the news business for the influencer age?

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Ipatel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Sarah Personnette, the CEO of Puck, a fancy newish media company that's been around for about five years now. Puck has a really interesting model.

The company hires big stars and gives them newsletters that are all mostly part of a subscription bundle. And these reporters and their newsletters are often must-reads in their categories. Everyone in Hollywood reads Puck's Matt Bellony, for instance. Those reporters then get equity in Puck and a share of the company's revenue. The idea here is to combine the financial incentives of the personality-based influencer economy with the rigor of old school journalism.

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