Super Bowl SUNDAY SCARIES: Week of Sellouts

Tonight as the Patriots hopefully beat the Seahawks, brands will pay $7 million to buy 30 seconds of your belief during breaks in the game. And at halftime, we will see an artist who terrifies people precisely because they can’t force him to sell out. But first...

1. The Newspaper That Sold Out Its Newsroom

The Washington Post fired over 300 journalists this week. It included the entire sports section. Book Review. Foreign bureaus that are currently covering the Middle East, Ukraine, China: all gone. Reports say that the editor got on a Zoom at 8:30am and blamed AI and declining search traffic. (The Publisher/CEO, Will Lewis, has since stepped down and was photographed at NFL events in SF while journalists were protesting).

What was lost wasn't just the jobs or even the journalism. What died was one of the few systems that made you trust it: The Post had two reporters on every story and an editor who shaped it. That apparatus cost real money and real time and it produced something that couldn't be faked: institutional credibility. It took decades to build, was mythologized in “All the President's Men,” and it took a Zoom meeting to destroy.

We've been here before. In the 1830s, establishment “party papers” like the National Intelligencer and Niles' Weekly Register, the trusted infrastructure of American public life that cost a whopping 6 cents, lost their monopoly to the “penny press.” The New York Herald and The Baltimore Sun started as 1 penny advertising-supported hoax papers for bigger audiences, with less verification. The trust didn't transfer and it took a generation to sort out what replaced it.

Takeaway: Jeff Bezos is worth $260 billion, which means that he could fund the Post at a loss for more than 2,000 years. His choice to eliminate the integrity was only a business decision in that it was him selling out the truth.

(Sources: NBC News; Poynter; The New Republic)

2. The LLM Selling Out Integrity

Sam Altman called advertising inside AI “uniquely unsettling” and a “last resort” in late 2024. Eighteen months later (this week) ChatGPT started running ads. $60 CPMs and $200,000 minimums. Said another way: brands are now paying for ads inside a system that people only trust because it doesn't have ads.

In a perfectly-timed masterstroke to call it out, this week Anthropic, the company behind Claude, started running ads that mock ChatGPT's sponsored-answer voice. They all capture a human question being answered with helpful and then instantly salesy product push. One spot shows a chatbot pushing confidence-boosting insoles after a vulnerable fitness question. They are perfectly written and genuinely funny. And they're the loudest way to tell everyone just what it is that Anthropic refuses to sell.

Two AI companies. One selling out their integrity. One selling the refusal to sell it.

It's like the Reformation all over again: For a thousand years the Catholic Church was both telling people what was true and telling them what it meant. When the printing press cracked that monopoly, the Church monetized its hypocrisies in the form of “indulgences”, letting people buy their way to absolution without living truthfully.

In 1517, Martin Luther grabbed his hammer and nailed 95 theses to a church door in Germany, pointing out that the institution was selling the very thing it was supposed to protect (the Anthropic ads are much funnier than Luther was). The century that followed was the bloodiest fight over trust in European history. Now we'll see whether OpenAI survives with the same violent scrutiny.

Takeaway: OpenAI started selling trust before it finished earning it. It's the AI Reformation on fast-forward.

(Sources: Digiday; OpenAI Blog; CNBC)

3. The Platform That Made Trust Worthless

Here's where all of this ends up if nobody stops it:

As Tom Goodwin commented on LinkedIn this week, millions of people are served fictitious AI-generated stories on Facebook every day about things that aren't happening, illustrated by images of people who don't exist, driving traffic to sites that produce nothing. Facebook profits from the distribution. He screenshot one about a new NFL stadium in Miami which was 100% AI-lie. But the junk sites profit from the clicks and then the comments section fills up with people screaming “this is fake”, which only feeds the algorithm more engagement. The system is built to reward these scams.

Goodwin himself remembered that when he started in advertising in 2001, every claim in a TV ad had to be pre-approved by the BACC (the British equivalent of combining network clearances and the FTC in one). To take money or place money on ads was a social contract between the industry and the public.

But if you gut the institutions that verify and monetize the platforms that replace them, what fills the vacuum isn't chaos. It's Meta’s economy that runs on the absence of trust. Efficient. Profitable. Corrosive.

Takeaway: Facebook is the sewage that collects downstream when trust and integrity are removed from the system. And when trust is worthless, the people who can least afford to lose it pay the most.

(Sources: Tom Goodwin, LinkedIn; Advertising Standards Authority; Wall Street Journal)

4. The Artist Who Wouldn't Sell Out

Bad Bunny won Album of the Year at the Grammys last Sunday. (I’m not breaking the story here, but the first Spanish-language album to win in 68 years of the award is remarkable). Built on bomba, plena, and música jíbara: Puerto Rican folk traditions most of the Recording Academy couldn't even pronounce.

This isn't the story of an artist going mainstream; Bad Bunny did NOT make some English-language crossover album. He made the most Puerto Rican thing he could make, and that winning album turned out to also be the most-streamed release of 2025 globally.

Tonight he performs the Super Bowl halftime over the whining protests of Americans who don't own a map, or a history book. He's a thorn in the side of people whose influence depends on you only trusting the institutions they already own. Which is how you know he's a genuinely trusted voice. (Nobody tries to silence a voice that isn't threatening the status quo.)

Bad Bunny isn't frightening to those people because he will use the biggest stage in America tonight to be political. He's frightening because he already proved that he didn't need their permission, or their language, or their platforms to become the biggest artist on the planet. That's the precedent that keeps cultural gatekeepers up at night.

Takeaway: Bad Bunny’s album wasn't for everyone. It was for Puerto Rico, which translated more than well enough for everyone who listened around the world. So what's your Puerto Rico?

(Sources: CNN; Associated Press; Grammy.com)

This Week's Red Thread: The Sellouts

A newspaper sold its newsroom.
A chatbot sold its credibility.
A platform sold its users.

The sellouts got paid this week. They always get paid at first.

But tonight, the guy who didn't sell out gets the stage.

He got there by making something so specific it couldn't be co-opted, so rooted it couldn't be faked, and so good that the people who wanted him gone only proved he was the real thing.

That's the whole game now. Not just for artists. For every brand, person, company, or institution trying to matter in a world that's strip-mining trust for parts.

If you're a brand, ask yourself, what's your Spanish-language album?

What's the thing so rooted in who you actually are that it can't be diluted, can't be optimized, and can't be bought at $60 per thousand impressions?

What would you have to refuse in order to be trusted?

The sellouts will keep getting paid.

The question is whether you're building something worth not selling.

— NB