Puck invented a new model for how to pay journalists

From the New Yorker profile of the company:

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.