On a Friday night in September, a few days after news broke that David Ellison, the new billionaire owner of Paramount, was preparing a bid for Warner Bros Discovery, Matthew Belloni was embarking on a weekend of asking people what they thought about the potential merger. Belloni, a Los Angeles journalist who covers the entertainment business, especially wanted to talk to David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery. “Like, dude, what’s going on?” Belloni said he planned to ask him. “They’re taking the throne away from you!”

Zaslav – or Zaz, as Belloni calls him, in the diminutive – is a recurring character in Belloni’s industry-facing newsletter, What I’m Hearing … , which he writes for Puck, and in his podcast, The Town. Since starting the newsletter in 2021, Belloni has become a one-man competitor to Hollywood’s trades and a go-to read for the town’s executives, agents and their assistants.