Weekly Roundup – January 21st, 2026
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Disney’s Big Play: ESPN and ABC Hypes First-Ever Super Bowl Broadcast
"ESPN and ABC have released their inaugural promotional video for Super Bowl LXI, set to take place in February 2027 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. The hype video, which debuted following the New England Patriots’ matchup against the Houston Texans on January 18, 2026, marks the beginning of what promises to be a groundbreaking era for Disney’s sports media empire.
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Adding to the excitement, the broadcast will include alternative viewing options, giving it a “MegaCast” vibe reminiscent of ESPN’s College Football Playoff coverage. Peyton and Eli Manning will host their popular ManningCast on ESPN2, offering witty analysis and guest appearances alongside the main feed. This mirrors recent innovations, like CBS’s kid-friendly alternate broadcast on Nickelodeon for Super Bowl LVIII in 2024. Spanish-language coverage will air on ESPN Deportes, with streaming available across Disney+, NFL+, Hulu, and the new ESPN direct-to-consumer service. Veteran ESPN personality Chris Berman has also been confirmed to contribute to the coverage, extending his storied career with the network."
Our Take: Buried in this article is the important bit: the super bowl will air on ESPN’s keystone all-in-one streaming app launched last year, in addition to other Disney-owned streaming platforms like Hulu and Disney+. Yeah, yeah, it’s a big deal it will be broadcast on dual linear channels ABC and ESPN. However, this seems more like a move to placate the NFL on ensuring a massive audience. What executives at ESPN and NFL are probably looking at very closely during this broadcast is the viability of a Super Bowl being featured on a standalone streaming app like ‘ESPN’. In recent years, NBC’s Peacock and CBS’ Paramount+ have enabled subscribers to stream the Superbowl without cable subscriptions. As of now, the bulk of Super Bowl viewership across the U.S. still comes through traditional television. But it’s a signal of intent from broadcasters and the NFL alike that they are making the super bowl available to stream on standalone streaming services that don’t require a cable subscription to their parent companies (like Paramount+/CBS, and Peacock/NBC).
Social media addiction’s surprising challenger? Anti-doomscrolling influencers
"It’s simple to accidentally become entranced by an endless loop of videos on Instagram or TikTok. But sometimes, that mindless scroll is interrupted by a reminder that what you thought was a 10-minute break spent on your phone was closer to 30 minutes.
Olivia Yokubonis, armed with a kind voice and scientific research, often pops up in feeds on social platforms, gently reminding viewers that they might not remember the video they saw two videos before she appeared on the screen.
Yokubonis is a content creator who goes by the name Olivia Unplugged online, making videos to combat overuse or mindless use of social media. For the most part, people who view her videos welcome the disruption from the endless loop of content, treating it as a wake-up call to get off their phones. Other times, they are snarky."
Our Take: Everyone doomscrolls. And everyone, at least that I know, seems to feel slightly ashamed of their doomscrolling and wants to ‘cut down’. Here come ‘anti-doomscrolling influencers.’ The ironic element to this story is that one is still consuming social media content that talks about how bad it is to consume another type of social media content. This is a reflexive loop of media consumption: the medium produces a ‘pathology’, then monetizes the critique of that ‘pathology’ inside the same medium. The user never exits the system. They just change genres. You will never escape.
Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT
"AI is reaching a point where everyone can have a personal super-assistant that helps them learn and do almost anything. Who gets access to that level of intelligence will shape whether AI expands opportunity or reinforces the same divides.
We’ve been working to make powerful AI accessible to everyone through our free product and low-cost subscription tier, ChatGPT Go, which has launched in 171 countries since August. Today we’re bringing Go to the U.S. and everywhere ChatGPT is available, giving people expanded access to messaging, image creation, file uploads and memory for $8 USD/month. In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.
People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place. That means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising. You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers. And we need to keep a high bar and give you control over your experience so you see truly relevant, high-quality ads—and can turn off personalization if you want."
Our Take: The snarky take would be to say that ChatGPT is going bust and needs a cash infusion to show impatient investors that it will be financially viable in the long-term. Those snarky people also like to lazily compare the AI bubble to the Dotcom bubble. But this misses the point entirely. Yes, there was a dotcom bubble that did go bust. However, being on the internet is an inherent facet of contemporary life, unless you are the Unabomber redux. Maybe those companies in the Y2K internet boom did go bottoms-up – but that doesn’t mean the internet isn't essentially everything for everyone in modern society. And regardless of whether certain major AI companies go bust in a bubble, AI will define the way we live very, very soon, if not already. So while we may scoff at the predicted financial misfortunes of certain AI upstarts, it doesn’t mean that that technology simply goes away. In the case of AI, it will probably be just as integral to modern life as the internet is today.
Media Execs Prepare for AI to Bring End of Journalism Industry
"Traffic to news sites has already been plunging, a trend that preceded the AI boom but only accelerated as chatbots like ChatGPT began to replace the search engine. Analytics data cited in the RISJ report shows that web traffic directed to news sites from Google Search has plummeted 33 percent across the globe.
With omens like those, Nick Newman, senior research associate at the RISJ, predicts the “traffic era” of the early internet, which once sustained traditional publishers, may finally be coming to an end.
“It is not clear what comes next,” Newman told The Guardian. “Publishers fear that AI chatbots are creating a new convenient way of accessing information that could leave news brands — and journalists — out in the cold.”
“But tech platforms do not hold all the cards,” he added. “Reliable news, expert analysis and points of view remain important both to individuals and to society, particularly in uncertain times. Great storytelling — and a human touch — is going to be hard for AI to replicate.”
Some publishers seeing the writing on the wall have pivoted to embracing AI tech. But the way it’s being deployed in many cases is almost certainly a miscalculation, imperiling fundamental tenets of good journalism by introducing hallucinating tech into the loop — which is to say nothing of the coincidentally-timed layoffs that have been hamstringing the industry."
Our Take: Last time I checked, we are far away from robot journalists going door-to-door in their investigative work for a ‘big scoop’. As advanced as AI is, it still is based on human-generated content. And the high-quality of some AI content is very much a result of the high-quality human work on which it was based. Have you ever asked a chatbot to summarize or analyze a piece that was originally composed by AI? The quality of a piece significantly suffers in proportion to how many iterations it is away from the original human work. So, journalism can still be saved! Unless of course we are all smooth-brained from the incessant consumption of short-form-video brainrot that has dulled our synapses to oblivion and we generally engage in no higher-register thinking beyond swiping up to the next hypodermic needle, ahem, video.
