CEO of Puck. Believer that journalists were the original influencers.
She spent two decades learning how media actually makes money - inside Universal McCann, Facebook, Refinery29, and Twitter. Now she runs the newsroom where the reporters own a piece of the upside.
Puck covers the conversation that happens after the press conference ends - the one in the hallway, the green room, the back of the car. Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, sports, fashion. The New York Times called it "Vanity Fair for the Substack era." Sarah Personette is the person who has to make that romance pay rent.
She became CEO on January 7, 2024, stepping into a seat that had sat empty since co-founder Joe Purzycki left the previous spring. Puck did not need another writer. It had brilliant ones, several of whom owned equity in the company they reported for. What it needed was someone who had spent a career on the unglamorous side of media - the side with spreadsheets, ad budgets, retention curves, and payroll.
That is exactly the resume Personette brought. Before Puck she was Chief Customer Officer at Twitter, running global revenue and the entire ad-sales machine through the most chaotic chapter in the company's history. She had been VP of global business marketing at Facebook, COO of Refinery29, U.S. president of Universal McCann, and a senior VP at Starcom Mediavest before that. Twenty years of learning, in granular detail, how attention turns into money.
The thesis she carries into Puck is deceptively simple. Journalists, she likes to point out, were the original influencers. People did not subscribe to a masthead so much as they followed a byline. The creator economy figured out how to pay individual voices directly. Old-school journalism kept the rigor but lost the economics. Puck's bet is that you can have both - reporters with real reach, real standards, and a real stake in the business.
It is working well enough to be interesting. Puck's paid subscriber base has grown roughly 30% year over year, and Personette has spoken openly about steering the company toward profitability rather than chasing scale for its own sake. The growth plan runs into fashion, into the business of sports, into live events and editorial franchises - new rooms where Puck's brand of insider coverage can travel.
Her job, in other words, is to take a thing that critics assume cannot last - independent, high-end journalism - and prove it can be a durable business. Not by cutting corners, but by aligning who wins. When the journalist, the company, and the subscriber are all rowing the same direction, the math gets easier.
"Journalists were the original influencers."
“Stay calm, stay focused, stay classy.” — Sarah Personette's leadership mantra
She did not arrive at the corner office by accident. According to her own telling, she decided she wanted to be a CEO at seven. The path there ran straight through the revenue engine of nearly every important platform of the last two decades.
Puck puts journalists at the center of the company, with equity stakes that tie their success to the business they report for. Aligned incentives instead of a masthead.
Email newsletters and subscriptions built around individual writers with reach. The creator economy's economics, with the standards of real reporting attached.
Under Personette, growth runs into fashion, the business of sports, live events, and new editorial franchises - extending Puck's insider coverage into fresh territory.
Illustrative of Puck's stated coverage areas - the "corridors of power."
Two decades on the business side of media, mapped to the job.
Running Puck is the day job. It is not the only one. Personette sits on a spread of boards that pull her across health care, e-commerce, civic life, and venture - the kind of portfolio you accumulate when operators trust you to read a balance sheet and a room at the same time.