Good morning. "The lawyer for the president is going to jail," NYT's Michael Shear tweets. "With all the chaos swirling around the White House for the last two years, it’s easy to forget how remarkable that is."

Bloomberg

What David Pecker knows

Moving the Market: David Pecker, the American Media Inc. CEO and publisher of National Enquirer, is cooperating with federal prosecutors and has admitted to making a $150,000 payment "in concert with" Donald Trump's presidential campaign to kill a story about the candidate's alleged affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal.

• The revelation came after Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in arranging hush-money payments to McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels.

The Big Picture: Pecker's admission bolsters the case that Trump violated campaign finance law through payments intended to withhold information from voters. AMI told prosecutors the payment was made to "suppress" McDougal's story "so as to prevent it from influencing the election."

What's Next: Former American Media executive Stu Zakim tells me Trump should be "very nervous" about what else Pecker might tell prosecutors:

• "David would be privy to Trump's relationships with women, not so much what he did with his money or anything on a business level. ... It's going to be about women, not about money."

• "Those guys have been buddies for decades, buddies with benefits. ... I can only imagine they were hanging out, picking up women in the late 1980s and 90s, doing who knows what."

• Zakim also confirmed that Pecker kept a safe containing damaging information about Trump, as previously reported by the Associated Press. "Pecker is a survivor," he said.

A Trump-Pecker Backgrounder, via The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin from July 2017: "Pecker and Trump have been friends for decades ... Throughout the 2016 Presidential race, the Enquirer embraced Trump with sycophantic fervor [and] trashed Trump’s rivals ... The impact of the tabloids, particularly their covers, remains substantial."

The Other Big Picture, via NYT's Emily Steel: "The country’s biggest tabloid publisher has now admitted to playing an important role in a scheme to keep the women silent before the 2016 election."

Bloomberg

Davan Maharaj's price

Big in L.A.: Tribune Publishing secretly paid $2.5 million to former Los Angeles Times editor Davan Maharaj to stop him from exposing anti-Semitic remarks that Tribune publisher Michael Ferro (above) made about L.A. billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, NPR's David Folkenflik reports:

• During a dinner with Tribune's chief news executives, "Ferro railed against those who he felt were impeding him — including ... Broad, whom Ferro called part of a 'Jewish cabal' that ran Los Angeles."

• After Tribune fired Maharaj in August 2017, the editor "hired a prominent Beverly Hills attorney to pursue a wrongful termination suit. Maharaj had ammunition, having recorded Ferro in unguarded conversation with associates," including his remarks about Broad.

• Tribune "agreed to pay Maharaj secretly more than $2.5 million, in installments ... That financial obligation was not disclosed in corporate filings to shareholders and analysts."

Hardest Hit: Maharaj, if only because Ferro was already notorious for a litany of offenses, including what Folkenflik describes as his "ill-fated impulse" to rebrand Tribune as Tronc, "waves of layoffs and buyouts for staffers at the same time executive compensation shot upward," and "a failed effort to hold off union organizing drives," among other things.

As a source close to the paper notes, "the truth might have ushered Ferro out the door a year earlier."

How It's Playing ... L.A. Times investigative reporter Harriet Ryan: "You're the editor of the LA Times. You find out the CEO is an anti-Semite. Do you: a) confront him? b) assign an investigative reporter to expose him? Or c) use the information to get a $2.5M personal payout at a time the company is laying off journalists and closing bureaus?"

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Jason Bollenbacher/Getty

Eddy Cue's 'Netflix for news'

Talk of the SFO-JFK: "Apple is preparing to relaunch Texture, an app ... that offers unlimited access to about 200 magazines... as a premium product within Apple News," Bloomberg's Gerry Smith reports:

• "The company plans to make it a premium product within Apple News, which curates articles and comes preinstalled on iPhones ... A new version could be unveiled as soon as this coming spring."

• "Apple is trying woo newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times to join Texture and plans to refine its design."

Why it scares publishers:

• "Some executives fear ... Apple could steal their current subscribers, who would save money by reading articles on Texture instead."

• "At $9.99 a month, Texture would be cheaper than an unlimited digital subscription to the New York Times."

The Big Picture: "The Texture reboot will test whether the all-you-can-eat subscription model popularized by Netflix and Spotify can work for news."

How It's Playing ... Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University: "Apple may be literally the only company that could pull off a 'Netflix for news.' ... That said, the economics of magazines and newspapers are pretty different."

Flashback: What Cue told me at last year's SXSW, the day Apple acquired Texture:

• "We wanted to bring great articles from trusted sources in a beautiful layout ... Texture, with the brands [they have], some of the best magazines in the world ... we're really excited about bringing that into Apple News. ... We want the best articles, we want them to look amazing, and we want them to be from trusted sources."

Market Links

• Michael Bloomberg talks politics with Vanity Fair (VF)

• Mark Zuckerberg is selling -- yes, selling -- your data (NYT)

• Eddy Cue poaches another talent from Sony (Variety)

• Jeffrey Katzenberg adds another exec at Quibi (THR)

• Les Moonves continues to frustrate staff at CBS (VF)

Andrew Chin/Getty

Ellen eyes her exit

Talk of Tinseltown: "Ellen DeGeneres is considering ... retiring from the long-running hit show that bears her name," NYT's Jason Zinoman reports:

• "She's been receiving conflicting advice from her wife, the actress Portia de Rossi, and from her older brother, Vance DeGeneres, a comedian, and has changed her mind more than once."

• "DeGeneres recently took the option to extend her contract — until the summer of 2020 — although she had been close to declining."

• "On the question of leaving, she changes her mind all the time. Her brother [has made] the case that in the age of Trump, the country needs her positive, unifying voice on television every day."

The Big Picture: "As much as anyone possibly could, [Ellen] has taken on Oprah Winfrey’s mantle as the queen of inspirational daytime talk, providing an oasis of positivity and escapist comedy in a culture short on both. ... In person, she is more blunt, introspective and interesting..."

Wesley Hitt/Getty

How Rupert reinvented the NFL

One for the History Books .... or, what Moraga and Century City are reading: "The Great NFL Heist: How Fox Paid for and Changed Football Forever," by The Ringer's Bryan Curtis (publishing soon):

• "In December 1993, Rupert Murdoch did what the owners of Amazon or Facebook are allegedly going to do in a few years. He wrote a $1.6 billion check to put football on his rickety, seven-year-old network. A few weeks later, Murdoch paid a smaller but still gargantuan sum to sign CBS’s John Madden."

• "This wasn’t an underdog tale, like the ESPN origin story. Murdoch was exploiting the vulnerabilities of the old networks even as — and this would be a recurring theme — he and Fox sought their own credibility."

• "The men who created Fox Sports thought TV football had gotten stale — 'boring as shit,' as one of them put it. They wanted to 'Fox-ize' it..."

Read the oral history at The Ringer.

What's Next: Thursday Night Football, which features a fight for the AFC West between the 10-3 Chargers and the 11-2 Chiefs (on Fox and Amazon). We're old enough to remember when Thursday night games were a reliable afterthought.

See you tomorrow.