CBS is just two ad slots away from being sold out of Super Bowl inventory, says CBS' John Bogusz. And "with record rates of up to $3.8 million per 30-second slot, CBS will post record Super Bowl ad sales revenue for the game," writes Bruce Horovitz.

Al-Jazeera's just-announced acquisition of Current TV for about $500 million "is a coming of age moment," writes Brian Stelter. The "pan-Arab news giant... just bought itself 40 million more chances to make its case" that it's "a legitimate news organization, not a parrot of Middle Eastern propaganda or something more sinister." Like Current, which "similarly, has suffered from paltry ratings," Al Jazeera has the challenge of "persuading Americans to watch — an extremely tough proposition given the crowded television marketplace and the stereotypes about the channel that persist to this day."

New cable channels like Back9Network, a golf-lifestyle-based offering with Clint Eastwood as its chairman, face tougher negotiations with cable and satellite distributors working to ease rising content costs -- in some cases getting rid of channels they consider nonprofitable, as Time Warner has done with Ovation and threatens to do with others.  Jeanine Poggi looks at how various companies are coping -- from Back9Network, reportedly "about halfway through initial carriage negotiations with some of the bigger satellite and cable operators" -- to "a new court and legal news channel called Justice Central, [which] is trying to avoid the headwinds …

News Corp. bought Cleveland-based regional sports TV network Sports Team Ohio, which broadcasts Cleveland Indians games, for an undisclosed sum that could be close to $230 million, according to a source cited by Reuters. "News Corp has been stepping up efforts to control the rights to key sports teams in response to Time Warner Cable Inc's $3 billion deal in February 2011 to carry the Los Angeles Lakers basketball games on its Time Warner SportsNet Channel."

Two pieces on women's mags to begin the year: Adweek's Emma Bazilian writes about Glamour's first "hair-themed issue-within-an-issue with its own cover, table of contents and editorial that begins on the opposite side of the book," exclusively sponsored by Unilever and featuring an unnamed cover girl we're certain has to be Zooey Deschanel, according to the clues Bazilian provides. Next up is a trend piece by Christine Haughney on how women's magazine editors are finally allowing some vulgar words on the covers and inside their books -- although on a limited basis. "Women’s magazines perhaps haven’t pushed …

Can first-time newspaper owner Aaron Kushner succeed by "defying conventional wisdom [by] spending heavily to expand the printed edition and playing down digital formats" at the Orange County Register? According to Elliott Spagat, who details Kushner's strategy in this piece, "It's too early to know whether he's right. Kushner said advertising revenues have grown, though he won't say how much."

Personal-health stories abound in broadcast and print journalism, and yet these reports often focus on contradictory or just plain wrong information, asserts David H. Freedman in a long, well-thought-out piece.  "The problem is not, as many would reflexively assume, the sloppiness of poorly trained science writers looking for sensational headlines, and ignoring scientific evidence in the process," Freedman writes. Instead,  "personal-health journalists have fallen into a trap. Even while following what are considered the guidelines of good science reporting, they still manage to write articles that grossly mislead the public, often in ways that can …