A sprawling podcast interview with Sarah Personette, CEO of newsletter outfit Puck, tried to answer how media companies can survive between dying legacy models and the creator economy. The conversation covered Puck's talent-first approach - giving journalists equity and subscriber bonuses - but avoided hard numbers on profitability, exit strategy, or sustainable unit economics. While Personette touts 100,000 paying subscribers (most from acquiring Air Mail) and 40% revenue growth, the interview revealed more philosophical debate than business strategy.
Sarah Personette wants you to believe journalists are the original influencers. That's the pitch behind Puck, the five-year-old media company she's run for the past two and a half years. But in a lengthy podcast interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, the former Facebook and Twitter executive struggled to explain how that model actually works when platforms control distribution and creators capture most of the upside.
Puck operates in a strange middle ground. It's not a legacy media company with 200-person newsrooms bleeding money. It's not Substack, where solo operators keep 90% of revenue. Instead, it gives star journalists like Hollywood reporter Matt Belloni equity stakes and bonuses tied to subscriber acquisition, retention, and events - while taking a cut larger than Substack's 10% to fund sales teams, health insurance, and growth marketing.
The numbers tell a partial story. Puck now claims over 100,000 paying subscribers, though Personette confirmed most of that jump came from acquiring Air Mail in October. The company's subscription revenue grew 50% last year, total revenue 40%. But when pressed on profitability, Personette would only say they're "very close" - declining to specify whether that's a dollar or a million dollars away.
That vagueness extends to the equity compensation Puck uses to retain talent. Journalists get stock, but it pays no dividends and there's no stated exit plan. "Right now, we are completely focused on continuing to grow the successful company," Personette said when asked about liquidity events. For reporters comparing Puck to going independent on Substack - where Matt Belloni himself admitted he could "make a lot more money" - illiquid equity is a tough sell.
The core tension Patel identified cuts deeper. Platforms like Facebook and X gutted institutional media by making individuals the unit of distribution. Reporters realized they could monetize 2,000 Twitter followers and make more than their newsroom salary. Puck wants to be an institution that supports those individuals, but without controlling distribution or offering influencer-level economics.
Personette's answer? A bundle of services journalists supposedly can't get solo: legal support, fact-checking, sales teams, CRM infrastructure, health insurance. "Many journalists are actually looking to be able to be independent and really be free to express the stories that they want to express, but also to have infrastructure around them," she said. Two journalists left Substack to join Puck because they couldn't monetize the platform as well, she claimed.
But subscriber acquisition - the metric that makes or breaks media companies - remains murky. Puck's biggest paid channels are social platforms and SEO. They don't run paid ads on individual journalists' social feeds. They rely on newsletters, organic social, PR, and events. When Patel asked what single channel drives most growth, Personette pivoted to talking about "fragmentation" and "multimodal franchises."
That's the language of someone without a platform's distribution engine or a creator's direct audience relationship. Puck sits uncomfortably in between, which might be why Personette kept reframing questions about economics as questions about mission. "If you have any aspiring journalists on your pod, what's the motivation that they have around wanting to be a journalist?" she asked, dodging the point that motivation doesn't pay rent.
The Air Mail acquisition reveals the strategy's limits. Puck bought Graydon Carter's post-Vanity Fair glossy culture magazine - a brand play for an older, affluent audience with less than 6% overlap with Puck's professional readers. They laid off people on both sides during "synergy work" (Personette's term). They're still working out how to bundle the subscriptions. It looks less like a talent-first model and more like traditional M&A to hit subscriber targets.
Personette spent eight years at Facebook during the pivot to video, the shift to mobile, the Cambridge Analytica crisis. She saw platforms promise to support publishers, then systematically hollow them out. Now she's betting Puck can succeed by rejecting both the platform model and the old institutional model - while somehow competing with both.
When Patel pushed on whether Puck will stay small or find big growth, Personette insisted their portfolio of trade verticals serving "the opinion elite" isn't small at all. "I actually think it is quite exciting and can be quite large," she said. But large compared to what? A dying newspaper? A Substack star? A billion-user platform? She never said.
The interview ended with Personette teasing more investment in DC coverage, their AI vertical, and eventually video - all the things media companies say when they're looking for the next growth lever. Whether any of it leads to profitability, she wouldn't commit to a timeline.
Puck's model might work for a certain class of journalist who wants institutional support without institutional constraints. But Personette's refusal to detail profitability timelines, exit strategy, or distribution mechanics suggests the economics remain unproven. The company exists in the gap between platforms that own distribution and creators who own audiences - a gap that's been closing for a decade. Whether 100,000 subscribers and 40% growth can sustain that position long enough for the equity to mean something remains the unanswered question.
