CBS News's $50M Loss, MSNOW Hand-Wringing & The Argument’s Uphill Battle

This week, Mark Lazarus, the prospective chief executive of Versant, announced that MSNBC would change its name to My Source News Opinion World, or MSNOW—a rebrand so intrinsically satirizable that, after covering the announcement, media organizations from The New York Times to Variety felt compelled to publish follow-up items about the derision and ridicule it had inspired. In the annals of corporate nomenclature, only Tribune Publishing’s short-lived transformation into “tronc” (yes, all lowercase) could be seen as similarly risible. Critics noted MSNOW’s obvious connotations with multiple sclerosis, the long-defunct HBO Now, a fusion of Ms. magazine and the National Organization for Women, and the frozen water that crystallizes and falls to the ground in winter. As one high-level NBCUniversal insider texted me, “It does seem like an Accenture consultant had a bad day at Sweetgreens and was like, fuck it.”

Alas, there were reasons. Executives at NBCU had decided they did not want their brand, nor NBC News—a nominally down-the-middle broadcast news network—to maintain an affiliation with the avowedly liberal cable network. (Tellingly, NBCU had no qualms about CNBC—officially, the Consumer News and Business Channel—maintaining its farcical acronym.) It thus fell upon Lazarus and MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler to find an alternative. Laz characterized this as “an opportunity to chart our own path forward,” but, from a brand marketing perspective, they’d obviously been dealt a terrible hand.

MSNBC was already a case study in the value of brand consistency. More than a decade earlier, when Microsoft sold its last stake in the network, then-NBCU chief Steve Burke and then-MSNBC president Phil Griffin considered a rebrand that would have abandoned the suddenly obsolete five-letter mashup. But as one source present at the time told me, “Every study we did told us we were out of our mind: You’ve got a great brand, don’t fuck with it.” So the “MS” stuck, despite the network having severed all ties with Microsoft.

Laz and Kutler’s decision followed a similar logic, while also betraying some inconvenient truths about their prospects. Like other cable news networks, MSNBC is a decidedly profitable business, netting what I’m told is north of $500 million in annual profits. The vast majority of its revenue derives from linear carriage fees and advertising, all of which will need to flow inward after the spinoff. In order to maintain that cashflow, MSNBC didn’t want to risk any brand confusion on the channel guide, especially given that more than 90 percent of its audience is AARP-eligible. In essence, Laz and Kutler sacrificed the opportunity for a genuinely bold, future-facing rebrand in order to ensure that octogenarians scrolling through their Spectrum channel guide would still be able to find Lawrence O’Donnell. (“The most important thing to Rebecca was keeping the ‘MS’ in the name,” a source close to Kutler told me.)

On some level, that makes perfect sense: In cable’s post-spin era, almost all networks are going to be milked for cash while the businesses right-size for a smaller and more fiscally responsible digital future. Laz and Kutler would be insane to leave money on the table—especially since they’ll now be footing the bill for their own bureaus, reporters, and newsgathering infrastructure, all of which is going to put a heavy dent in the aforementioned profit margins. On the bright side, I’m told their channel distribution isn’t changing, so at least the channel numbers will stay the same.