But Rasmussen, who had worked both in sports coverage and as a communications director for a hockey team, knew something about the audience that outsiders didn’t: true fans always want more.

There’s a similar calculation being made right now in Silicon Valley, where new entertainment brands are targeting an audience of tech obsessives who, like the sports fans, can’t get enough daily updates, insights and data from the most influential people in their industry. And last month, that growing power struggle to control the future of “new media” came to a head with OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN and the launch of a16z-backed rival show, MTS.

TBPN is a daily live show about the tech business, hosted by two tech entrepreneurs, Jordi Hays and John Coogan. Unlike many of their nerdy peers, they are relatively natural on camera: relaxed but not rambling. They are also hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts; like Ant & Dec with an upscale Hollywood gym membership.

Given that both have founded successful companies, which have matured and secured handsome acquisitions, they have significant cachet with business leaders; guests appreciate that the hosts have had skin in the game. And as a result, people like Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir boss Alex Karp, and the Collison brothers, who founded Stripe, are happy to come on. They know they won’t be subjected to an aggressive grilling. 

More from this author

Demis Hassabis: renaissance man

By Alys Key

The idea of fandom is key to the genre. It’s taken as a given that the viewer has a keen interest in the space, so the conversation can get pretty technical very quickly. In one recent episode, for example, the hosts were digging into semantic layers and scheme migrations with one guest, before batting around energy and geopolitical hypotheticals with fossil fuels advocate Alex Epstein the next.

Called the SportsCenter of Silicon Valley, it has also borrowed its look from the sports shows, with its split-screen discussions and canned sound effects. Even its full title, the Technology Business Programming Network, is a nod to ESPN.

And it has worked. Since its launch in late 2024, TBPN has become the biggest show in its niche — which you might call techno-capitalism. Yet it remains relatively small, pulling in an average of 70,000 viewers per episode. This is deliberate. According to Coogan, their high-value ideal audience numbers only around 200,000 founders, executives and adjacent people. Their goal, he says, “was to create a platform to reach the core audience… If we start bringing in new topics just to reach 10M views, it wouldn’t feel natural and we would lose the core audience we have worked to build.” 

Certainly, it can be hard to get a general audience invested in the comings and goings of founders and funders, new AI model releases, and the B2B Saas of it all. So the TBPN approach is unapologetic. It’s not trying to sell tech to a new audience.

That focus clearly paid off, given OpenAI bought it in a surprise move last month for somewhere in the “low hundreds of millions”. The company suggested that the acquisition would help prepare the world for the changes wrought by AI. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO for AGI deployment, wrote that the business has “a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates — with builders and people using the technology at the center”, and that TBPN had already created such a space.

The rationale doesn’t quite ring true. TBPN is not the place for long, philosophical discussions about superintelligence; if this is what the frontier lab wants it could have bought out Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast. Instead, it looks more like an attempt to acquire some likability: befriending the jocks for a bit of second-hand popularity.

And that’s partly why the venture hit the right note. Where the 2010s tech sector took pains to show off its DEI credentials, today, there has been a notable vibe shift: tech bros are increasingly embracing their “bro-ness”. TBPN’s original name was even Technology Brothers. They’re taking a page out of another masculine-coded industry’s playbook.

But even more significant is that so much of what sports media invented suits the internet immensely well. Live event coverage and post-match chats can translate into the era of the multi-hour Twitch livestream. Turning commentators into personalities in their own right goes hand in hand with the increasing focus on turning journalists into influencers — and vice versa.

Suggested reading

When Dawkins met Claude

By Richard Dawkins

Tech is not the first sector where a sports DNA has proven revitalizing for its coverage. Fast-talking stock markets commentator Jim Cramer, a son of Philadelphia’s all-consuming sports culture, first tried his hand at sports reporting before moving into finance, and eventually becoming famous as the host of the SportsCenter-esque Mad Money. More recently, startup media brands such as The Ringer, brainchild of ESPN alum, cover the business of Hollywood with a sports fan fervor, with casting announcements dissected like they’re player drafts and awards shows like tournaments. 

Imitators have sprung up in the wake of TBPN’s success. There’s the European answer etn., which riffs on TBPN’s schtick right down the hosts appearing in promo imagery wearing matching suits. And now we have MTS.

The new show takes its name from “monitoring the situation”, an online meme used to describe the semi-serious way in which news junkies and day traders on X keep up with current affairs. This new entrant doesn’t seem to have quite found its footing yet, despite the opportune timing: many X users suspect that TBPN has been disappeared from their feeds, owing to Elon Musk’s longstanding feud with the show’s new boss, Sam Altman. MTS is a little bit more internet-poisoned than TBPN, bringing together the worlds of rambling politics livestreams with tech twitter discourse. 

But crucially it sees TBPN’s bet on the persistent interest in tech news and raises it. Like its pioneering cable forbearers, MTS is live, all the time. Or at least it aspires to be. These early weeks have been punctuated with off-air stretches. And when it’s online, even the channel’s most interesting segments struggle to justify being stretched out. The success or failure of the venture will hinge on whether it can demonstrate there is a truly bottomless appetite for tech news discussion, in the way there is for sports.

For the technology industry, the existence of and investment in these shows is a sign of self-consciousness among executives and companies. They know that they are the entertainment now, as the huge interest in blow-by-blow accounts of the Musk v. Altman underscores. They even have fanbases. 

Those parasocial relationships will only become more intense this year as SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others eye joining the stock market. Soon, those viewers will also be shareholders. That dynamic of obsessive ownership already defines so much of our culture, from prediction markets gamblers sending journalists death threats to the easily-provoked wrath of K-pop stans. 

These shows, though, highlight a weakness at the heart of big tech. They reveal it to be a sector that would prefer to build its own media ecosystem than engage with the existing one. Suspicion of journalists — and attempts to remake their profession from the outside — has never been more acute in the tech world. So it feels easier in that context for industry bosses to retreat to home turf. But too much navel-gazing and non-confrontational chatting will only entrench the industry’s insularity and keep it further detached from the public opinion about AI and other disruptive technologies. Having built themselves a fans-only enclosure, they might fail to notice when the crowd turns ugly.

ESPN, once the pinnacle of excellence in sports coverage and journalism, has transformed into a “negative attention” mill, sacrificing its reputation to pursue a business strategy of cheap clickbait, empty controversy, and the self-centered whining of delinquent children. For sports-lovers across America, that’s bad enough. But even worse is how ESPN’s decline presages a broader cultural collapse, one that’s dragged journalistic standards, civil discourse, and athletic culture into the national sewer.

When I was a kid in the late Nineties, watching ESPN was the sporting equivalent of religious experience. The network’s high broadcast quality of games and matches had no rival; the journalism was groundbreaking and reliable; the analysis was insightful. It should go without saying that a television station with the actual name of “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” made athletic competition the center of its broadcasting cosmos.

ESPN was the brainchild of Bill Rasmussen, a sports journalist who aspired to create his own network after losing his media job with a Connecticut ice hockey team. After securing investors and sponsorships, his channel made its debut in 1979. Its climb to the top of sports broadcasting was slow and steady — yet, by the Nineties, it dominated America’s sports programming. There are plenty of reasons for this, from the right on-air talent to the novelty of cable television, yet perhaps most striking of all was ESPN’s innovative programming.

That began, of course, with live sports. Yet when ESPN wasn’t showing one of the “big four” — baseball, basketball, football, hockey — it showcased less popular games from tennis to billiards. There were also sporting documentaries, often involving “classic” games, like a dramatic comeback victory in the NBA finals or a no-hitter in baseball. Then there was NFL Films, a sports media company founded by a veteran of the Second World War, and which transformed old American football games into pure cinema. With aesthetic sophistication and theatrical voiceovers, its patented slow-motion spiral took on the feel of a history-altering event. NFL Films not only influenced sports coverage, but also Hollywood. Any Given Sunday and Remember the Titans are just two of the movies that made use of NFL Films’ epic style.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2009, meanwhile, ESPN debuted its 30 for 30 series. Enlisting Barry Levinson, Spike Lee, and other A-list Hollywood film directors, the documentaries explored moments when sport interacted with politics or pop culture, such as the OJ Simpson murder trial or NBA legend Magic Johnson’s diagnosis with HIV. Entries in the series have won Emmys, Academy Awards, and the Peabody, arguably the most prestigious prize in broadcast journalism.

And if it might seem silly to present adult millionaires playing games as high art, ESPN also had a sense of humor. Sportscenter, its nightly news and highlight show, featured anchors as reputable for their wit and self-deprecating comic timing as their encyclopedic sports knowledge. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, two former Sportscenter hosts, had an effortless ability to turn out clever turns of phrase, memorable one-liners, and humorous nicknames. A good example of Olbermann’s trademark wit was his description of the infamous boxing match when Mike Tyson bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear. “Boxing is no longer a sport,” the presenter quipped. “It is a parody of the life of Vincent van Gogh.”

Taken together, anyway, it seemed as if ESPN would continue to advance the aesthetics and storytelling sport. Instead, 30 for 30 was the peak before the fall; a climber clawing at the apex moments before he loses his footing.

Network ratings and revenue peaked at the start of the 2010s. Competition from streaming services and alternative media led to the loss of younger viewers, who even among sports fans often don’t want to watch entire games, instead preferring highlight reels on social media. All this put immense pressure on Disney, ESPN’s parent company, to cut costs. The downsizing culminated in 2017, with mass layoffs of writers, on-air personalities, production crew members, and just about anyone else Disney deemed expendable. “It is really tricky in a cord-cutting environment to see a growth opportunity for ESPN,” one former ESPN executive told The New York Times.

From there, and pressured by the flatulent spread of fratboy sporting podcasts, ESPN began a frantic race to the bottom. The viewer who turns on the network today will need a strong stomach to endure hour after hour of loudmouths bloviating endlessly about any sports-adjacent subject that they believe will go “viral”. This leads to incessant repetition of tired debates, for instance whether Michael Jordan or LeBron James is the “greatest” basketball player of all time.

The hosts and commentators, sitting in studios with enough lighting to perform a root canal, also inject a bizarre amount of emotion into broadcasts. “Debates” often end in hysterics with former athletes and so-called “journalists” screaming over each other, their voices cracking, their veins bulging from their foreheads. The typical ESPN program, then, is an entry in the Real Housewives series: all millionaire talking heads peacocking as tough guys as they struggle to regulate their emotional responses, as if network executives are engaged in performance art to validate every feminist criticism of the psychologically dysfunctional man.

The master of this darkly stupid artform, and undisputed face of the network, is Stephen A. Smith, a veteran sports journalist who was previously suspended from the network for indignantly asking what a woman did to provoke the NFL star who assaulted her. He’s accumulated a record of monumental errors, sometimes questioning the performance of players who aren’t even on the field.

When Jason Whitlock, a former sports columnist, documented several contradictions and discrepancies in Smith’s memoir, meanwhile, the ESPN pundit replied by calling him a “fat piece of shit”. So he’s not exactly a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize. Yet despite his blunders, Smith is the highest paid personality at ESPN, earning $21 million per year to bug out his eyes and scream like a maniac.

Anyone looking for an indicator of the health of American culture would do well to consider how Smith has parlayed his boorish antics into dramatic acting jobs — landing roles on General Hospital and Law and Order — and, even more absurdly, political relevance. On his political podcast, he has interviewed sitting senators and governors. He has even toyed with a run for the presidency, recently telling friend and fellow egomaniacal nuisance, Bill Maher, that a campaign is “possible” because of his “disgust with the Democratic Party”. Nor is Smith alone: Pat McAfee, a former NFL punter and now lead host of ESPN’s college football programming, is similarly crass. Last year, to give one example, he shamefully repeated a false rumor that a University of Mississippi cheerleader had slept with her boyfriend’s father.

Meanwhile, ESPN still airs news shows and documentaries — but with lower budgets and less time. It’s clear, then, that the network is doubling down on its clickbait scream-fest strategy. Acting out a televisual example of the chicken and egg riddle, viewers are left to wonder if ESPN is merely following the example of a broader culture that has become increasingly crass, ill-informed, and histrionic. Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” is too broadly applied to contemporary culture. Yet there’s much truth to his claim that when platforms abandon their consumers and move to maximize profit, they inevitably become worse.

Something similar happened at ESPN. Competition and changing viewing habits were clearly beyond the network’s control. But rather than preserving its standards, and trusting the viewer’s intelligence, it instead surrendered to a world of viral rants that confuses “negative attention” with talent.

And whatever the false allure of social media, it’s clear that ESPN’s public is disappointed. The channel’s ratings are now in freefall, while the McAfee-hosted College Gameday has lost 300,000 viewers in the past year. Overall, the network’s ratings with the much-coveted 18-34 year-old demographic have dropped by 54% in less than a decade. Reporting on ESPN’s falling fortunes in the first week of November, Sports Illustrated ran a story with the headline, “ESPN and the Horrible, Rotten, No Good, Very Bad Week.”

To put it mildly, then, things aren’t going well. The devolution toward idiocy as business strategy is failing. So, how does ESPN plan to recover its losses, while securing its economic future? By surrendering even the pretense of journalistic independence.

More from this author

David Foster Wallace: prophet of American loneliness

By David Masciotra

Over the past year, the network has announced two corporate partnerships: one with the NFL, and the other with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). The strategic relationship will enable ESPN to stream exclusive content from both enterprises on its paid subscription network, ESPN+. It will also create “growth” and enlarge profits for Disney. If viewers are leaving, advertisement revenues decrease. A business relationship with the WWE fills the gap. Yet partnering with the WWE also takes ESPN’s status as a running joke, then injects it with steroids. Daytime hosts like Smith now interrupt daytime coverage of real sports to have shouting matches about “who is the best wrestler of all time”, debating the “athletic” achievements of men who pretend to fight while pretending to be vampires and members of the British royal family.

Beyond the unintentional hilarity, there are serious ethical questions here. The WWE is a company under consistent scrutiny for claims of sexual harassment and drug use — to say nothing of its indifference toward concussions and its now-cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia. There are problems with the network’s NFL deal too. The National Football League is the leading sports power in the US. By entering into a lucrative financial agreement with the company, ESPN has surrendered its ability to report on it with any neutrality or honesty. Fox News regularly faces rightful accusations of bias in favor of the Republican Party, but ESPN’s partnership is the equivalent of Fox signing an exclusive deal with the RNC to broadcast carefully curated content on Hannity.

Compared to war, environmental disaster, and the endangerment of democracy, the stakes of professional sports are quite low. To that extent, the word “entertainment” is in ESPN’s name with good reason. Yet the decline of journalism across all fields threatens the cultivation of an informed citizenry necessary to maintain a free society. Newspapers continue to shut down, creating news deserts throughout the US; expertise competes with opinion, while opinion itself is often little more than invective. Even worse, the tentacles of the multinational corporate octopus reach into every facet of storytelling, reportage, and analysis, shadowing journalism with a bias far darker and larger than anything that derives from party partisanship. To name one particularly brazen example, CBS News recently announced that it would broadcast a series of town hall debates on “things that matter” sponsored by Bank of America. One is tempted to assume that problems with the country’s financial system won’t matter much.

The doom of journalism, whether in athletics and politics, is far from inevitable. In the world of sport, the success of The Ringer, a sports news website and media company, demonstrates that there is still an appetite for high-quality news and analysis. Emerging platforms and alternative media companies show that, like the founding of ESPN itself, healthy innovation is always a possibility. And who knows? The decline of ESPN’s rating could yet act as an invitation to some entrepreneur hoping to give viewers what ESPN once delivered — but now neglects. But it could also act as a troubling omen. If the short-form videos of TikTok continue to influence audience expectations and journalistic output, things will only get worse.