How a Cable News Channel Starts Over: A Candid Chat With MS NOW’s Anchors
The clock is ticking on MSNBC. On Saturday Nov. 15, the cable channel will officially rebrand, losing its NBC name and iconography, and debuting its new MS NOW title, look and tagline: “Same Mission. New Name.” With Versant set to spin out from NBCUniversal next year, the NBC name and peacock has to go (CNBC will keep its name for now).
Rebecca Kutler, the president of MS NOW, has spent months building an entire news division to prepare for this moment, cutting deals with partners to fill in gaps, and building out a digital gameplan for when the switch gets made.
In MS NOW’s temporary Times Square offices (Versant executives affectionately call it “Summer Camp” to underscore its temporary nature), The Hollywood Reporter sat down with four of the channel’s most familiar faces: The 11th Hour host Stephanie Ruhle, Velshi host Ali Velshi, Katy Tur Reports anchor Katy Tur, and senior enterprise reporter Brandy Zadrozny, to discuss the rebrand, the new remit, the pluses and minuses of being free from a larger corporate parent, and how they see digital being a part of how they tell stories going forward.
As it happens, Ali Velshi will be the last anchor out the door, and the first one in the door: He is scheduled to shut down the MSNBC studios in 30 Rock Friday night when he guest hosts The Last Word, and will officially launch MS NOW’s new studios in Times Square Saturday morning.
I wanted to start by asking about the rebranding, going from MSNBC to MS NOW. I’m curious to get your thoughts as journalists that are the face of the channel in a lot of ways, and the people that viewers most associate with the channel and the company, what did you first think when you first heard about it, and what in your mind are the biggest challenges and biggest opportunities associated with kind of transforming the MSNBC brand into MS NOW?
Katy Tur: I think we were all disappointed when we heard it, because we were told that the name was going to stay. So I think it took a little bit of getting used to and understanding how it was going to work. Now, listen, I think we live in a new world. It’s not linear TV any longer. It’s not like you’re going to be going flipping through channels and looking for MSNBC and seeing MS NOW, and not knowing what that is, you are already going to be favoring this on whatever app you’re using. If you are going through your cable channels, we’ve been advertising it a lot.
I think the brand is more associated with us than it is the name. I think if you see Rachel [Maddow], you see Chris [Hayes], you see Jen [Psaki], Nicole [Wallace], Ali [Velshi], Brandy [Zadrozny], me, you’ll know it’s MSNBC, regardless of what the new name is. We have the MS in the beginning of it. I think it’ll be easier to do this now, as the world is changing and as people are changing the way they access media, than it would have been 10 years ago.
Ali Velshi: I’ve always been involved somewhere where the issue was channel placement. Back in the days, I remember CNNfn [CNN’s defunct business channel] was really concerned that they were not going to be next to CNBC, because it numerically mattered. And now nobody knows what number any channel is, and in three years, even the MS part won’t matter anymore. Everyone I’ve met — viewers who I see — knows there’s a change.
Tur: They are looking for Ali Velshi Reports.
Velshi: Correct, you’re exactly right. Not anyone has said to me, wow, that’s weird, it’s a weird name, nobody seems to care. I also don’t really care, because the work we do is so sort of intensive, and we’re so in it, we kind of all know what we do. I get it, I liked saying MSNBC more, but I kind of do like the perceived independence of what we do now, given the world that we’re in, given the exact world that we’re in right now where the ability to argue that you are an independent journalist, but your work for corporate media gets tougher. I’m not actually minding the name that nobody has gotten used to yet.
Tur: Yeah, it’s not like you’re seeing Versant in the headlines the way you’re seeing other corporate names.
Brandi Zadrozny: I used to work at The Daily Beast where we had to be like, “B, E, A, S, T, no, I didn’t name it. Now, tell me the story.” The story is what matters. Your brand is what matters. So many news organizations don’t want — it’s like a dirty word in journalism — us to have brands as journalists, but I think it’s completely effective, and I think it builds trust. And I think that’s why we have it here.
Stephanie Ruhle: For me, it’s not MS NOW, it’s MS WOW. No, it’s only because [Ali’s] here, I can’t help myself. I was surprised when I heard it, but I was never concerned. I think the media is in this tumultuous place. Who’s doing it right? Who’s doing it wrong? Like, oh my goodness, is the business dying? We work at a place that’s investing, and so to me, that’s the most exciting thing. Did we think that MS NOW was going to happen? We didn’t think it was going to happen. But for me, anytime the status quo is being shaken up, it’s a positive. If you are anywhere and you want to defend and protect the status quo, you’re in the wrong place, or you’re the dead wood trying to hide under the status quo. So if you are excited about the future, if you believe in the work that you make, then you should be enthusiastic about a change, because a shake up means you have the opportunity to end up on top.
One of the most interesting things that I think has happened as a part of the split with NBC is that Rebecca Kutler has been able to basically build a news organization from scratch. And part of that is you can pick and choose where you want to really invest and focus and figure out the stories and areas of coverage that are important to the audience. From your point of view, what do you see as the focus and places where, soon, MS NOW can really lean into coverage and stand out?
Tur: I’m excited to break news again. I think we have the opportunity now to hire people that we’ve been relying on for their coverage at other outlets, Carol Leonnig, hiring her, hiring Philip Bump, having Jacob Sobeooff here, having Brandy, we can break news now and focus on what we want to cover and not have to diffuse it with NBC News. I think it’s already proven in what we’ve been able to put on the air and what we’ve been doing already.
Velshi: We can fully lean into the holding to account thing, which is, you know, of the moment, a really tricky thing for people who work for traditional news networks. And so we are freer in the moment that requires us to do that, or where our viewer requires us to do that. That’s what they want us to do. Wherever they are in the political spectrum, they might be further left of center, they might be in the middle, they might be moderates, but they all want accountability, and now it doesn’t feel like we have to think too many times about what accountability looks like. We can just go ahead and do our job the way we’d like to.
Zadrozny: Yeah, it’s freeing. We don’t have to name names, but there has been capitulation in advance. There have been literally, payments to the administration, that some would argue are sort of needless. I left immediately. I didn’t need to think about it when I heard they were breaking off and [former NBC senior vp of editorial] Madeline Haeringer was coming here, I worked for her under NBC, and she’s got news judgment, and is quick with a green light. And we know where we’re headed. For me, it feels like, as a disinfo reporter generally, my mission has never been clearer. The lane has never been wider. It feels like this is the place that there was an opportunity to do the kind of journalism that we want to do.
I wanted dig into that a little bit. Because I do feel like misinformation and disinformation is rampant, especially with AI and like we just saw like with Sora. Some of that stuff is absurd, of course, but you can very easily see how it’s not going to be absurd depending on the context and the person. How do you see or frame the opportunity for you to really put the spotlight on your reporting, maybe in a way that wasn’t possible before?
Zadrozny: I think it’s an opportunity, because when we have a small website, and we have, you know, we’re bumping up reporters, but let’s say I’m competing with 10 other stories a day, right? Those 10 stories are going to drive the news of the day. And we’re not competing with “a woman is dead somewhere in Nebraska, and it’s going to get a lot of traffic.” We’re not covering that. We’re not covering commodity news. We’re doing news that hopefully is going to be here, and only here. We’re very specifically targeting with stories that are unique and of the moment. I’m excited about, not only the news mission, but also, we’re starting podcasts again under Madeline. So we’re going to be starting some new podcasts that I’m really excited about that are going to be tackling, mis and disinformation constantly. And it’ll have a high place on the homepage. It’ll have the ability to get onto shows.
In the larger construct, disinformation really is a dirty word. People don’t want to talk about it. Other news organizations want to pretend like it doesn’t exist anymore. But not only does it exist, it’s worse than ever. Tech companies have capitulated, and so have news organizations.
Velshi: Brandy and I have been talking about disinformation for a very long time, and in the beginning it was this quaint thing where someone would would do something that was not honest for clicks, right? It would just be monetized. And then Brandy used to explain to me how most of health information on the internet was misinformation. We just went up the pole until the point that now I can’t trust a post from the President the United States or from the administration, these doctored things, how quaint it was for us all those years ago, but now this is the center of the entire operation.
Our ability to hold power to account is important, and it’s what we should do. And we’ve got newsgathering, so our ability to bear witness in order to hold power to account is really important, but we have a whole extra layer to our lives now, and that is “what’s true and what’s a lie?” For many years, there was this conversation about alternative facts, but generally speaking, people could discern what’s true and what’s not. It’s really starting to get very difficult.
What’s your approach to dealing with that? Because I feel like that is something that a lot of journalists at, frankly, every news organization, are trying to grapple with, especially as video AI becomes more prevalent. It just feels like if you’re a high profile journalist, you have to be a lot more vigilant than you did before.
Tur: You take a breath and you wait for voices like Brandy to chime in to see whether this is real or not real. I mean, you can’t just go with whatever you see online, and we can’t be reposting stuff.
Velshi: I mean, it’s changed my social media behavior entirely because I don’t know. And I don’t even know how to be able to respond to somebody who said, “hey, why don’t you guys report on such and such.” I don’t know what such and such is.
Tur: I think it’s hard to exist in an atmosphere or an environment where there are so many different ways to consume information and so many different opportunities for you to be misled. I understand that we now live in that world, and some people are going to choose to go that route, but I believe it does make it more important for us to be more vigilant about it, and much more judicious with what we put on television and how we talk about it. I think our responsibility becomes greater because I’ve got friends who send me stuff and they’re like, “well, is this real or is that? Is that not right? Is this the truth? Or did you see this?” And I find that I’ve become the person in their lives who has to, like, discern the truth for them.”
Zadrozny: It’s really hard, my whole literal job is retracing these steps and be like, “here’s where this came from,” but, but in terms of the news business, people really like those stories. People really like understanding a video they saw, and why it’s fake and who made it and who’s profiting. People will read it, people will consume it, and they appreciate it, and they trust us more when we’re the deliverers in that sense.
When I was here last week, Rebecca talked a little bit about thinking about digital extensions of what is done on strictly on the linear channel. You mentioned the podcast Brandy, I do feel like there’s an opportunity to maybe move quickly with podcasts, with newsletters, with other digital extensions of what will soon be the MS NOW brand. How are you thinking about ways to take the work that you’re doing on the existing platforms and maybe how to bring them to other places? Because that’s how a lot of consumers, especially younger consumers, are getting their news right now. I think it just is going to become more important for everyone in the new space.
Tur: We have a process on my show where we clip the what we think are the most interesting parts of the show, and we put it on TikTok, there’s Instagram, there’s YouTube, and there’s the MSNBC social media platforms. We’ve also started doing longer-form interviews that we post directly to YouTube, and some of those are doing really well. I did one with Christine Romans the other day that I think was like 800,000 views in a few days. Yeah. It’s a good opportunity to exist in all those places, because the viewership on your social media platforms, or the listenership in a podcast are completely different than the audience you get online or on TV. And it’s important to be in both spaces. At some point there, the powers that be will figure out how to bring those together and make them all work under one umbrella for a bit from a business standpoint, but in the meantime, as they’re figuring it out, it’s so important to be to be as visible in those arenas as you possibly can be.
Velshi: Stephanie and I have started this new YouTube show. It’s nice because it’s a lot less produced than a TV show, which means Stephanie and I are that much more unplugged, which is fine for me, but with Stephanie, it will result in me losing my job at some point. But what we’re doing is different — we talk about economics and politics and the intersection thereof — but what’s neat is we’re taking questions from people, and wow, because you think you know who you’re talking to, and you think you know what they know, and you’re having these conversations, then the question comes in and you realize that somebody’s asking you about something that you skipped over about 20 minutes ago in the show. They really want the simple answer to how X relates to X, and that doesn’t make them ill-informed, because, generally speaking, our viewers are otherwise informed. They’re consuming news. But it’s a really interesting and humbling thing to find out you think you know your audience. They like you, but they actually want to hear some other things from you.
I met a woman, literally yesterday — two interesting interactions — one was a woman who said she watches me all the time, and at her age, she has time to and I did the thing you’re never supposed to say to somebody. I said, “Well, you said your age? How old are you?” She said she was 100. That was excellent, I took a picture with her. But more importantly, yesterday I met a woman who said, “I watch your show every weekend, a lot of it’s over my head.” And I said, “what do you mean by that?” She says “I read the newspapers, and I think I know a lot, but some of it’s over my head, but I think that’s just me.” And I said, “well, it’s not really, because you’re my client. If it’s over your head, I actually kind of need you to tell me that, because I’ll fix it.”
And so I gave her my number, and I said, text me when you’re watching and tell me if you understood that fully enough to explain it to someone else, and if not, I’m going to take another shot at it. This is what Stephanie and I are doing, realizing we’re talking about interest rates and global money flows and bonds and things like that. Somebody wants to know something very basic about the economy? Great. Now I can answer it for them. It’s a neat little thing.
Tur: That viewer was me.
Zadrozny: What’s smart about that is I am a person of the internet, mostly, not so much TV. And I think it’s using the talent that is obviously here, but not just putting a TV show on the internet, which is what has always happened with news. Here it is, then we’re gonna dump it on the internet. We’re gonna have the same four blocks. It looks like a TV show. That’s not what I’m gonna consume, but I will consume Ali and Stephanie having a conversation, and I will consume your TikTok’s tonight. Knowing that the platform and our social media team is really good, I’ve been so impressed by the MSNBC TikToks. It’s so fun to me.
Tur: I get recognized now from TikTok as frequently as I do from the show, and it’s a whole different generation of people.
It’s a vastly, vastly younger audience on TikTok that are not watching television at all, period.
Velshi: And I love that. It sort of just gives us — I’ll be the old fart here — but it gives us ways of thinking about how the message is different. That’s what I like. Because in the old days, when you and I were talking when I was at CNN, you could take the same content and put it out in different ways, and we can’t do that now. It’s not the same.
Tur: A lot of people tuned out of news because they got overwhelmed by this moment, and they can’t totally tune out of it, because their algorithm is going to feed them some stuff. So I have people who aren’t necessarily purposefully consuming MSNBC or NBC News or any any news organization, but are still getting quite a bit of information that is important to them from their social media feeds. So listen, I think we’re all still trying to figure out how it works within this industry and the business as we currently understand it, but there is reach there, and there is interest there, and it’s an exciting opportunity to evolve alongside the media happens.
I do think there are people that have tuned out. What are some of the things that you think about when trying to get people engaged?
Tur: There are people who still are invested in the country and in the success of the country. So they’ve tuned out because it is overwhelming and it can feel like it can be really depressing, but they still want to know essential information, and so what I try to communicate to them and find out what they need is, what do you need to make an informed decision about? Whether you volunteer somewhere ahead of the next elections, whether you campaign for somebody, or what you need to know when you go to the voting booth.
People are pulling their hair out and freaking out over story X, well, maybe that story is not as dire and not as alarming as maybe it’s put out there. You have to act both as an informer and an untangler for people, because the information out there, some of it’s very factual, and others, a lot of it is very muddy.
I’m curious to get your thoughts Stephanie and Ali, as the veteran business reporters here. It seems like one of the benefits of the Versant spin is that the cable channels before had been throwing off a lot of cash, and they were going to Comcast, and they were investing it in Epic Universe and all this other stuff that they were doing, and as a standalone company, it’s interesting because you’re a much smaller company…
Ruhle: But we’re going to take a swing. So there’s a lot of excitement and pride being part of NBC, and we’ve experienced the upside of that during our tenure working there, and we know that giant media companies move like big, slow behemoths, and if you think about all the positive stories that you’ve read in the last eight years about media, they’re all about newer businesses. They’re all about nimble, changing businesses. So none of us are leaving NBC to go to a brand new startup and independent and put our name on the door. Instead, we’re going to take with us the power and brand of the legacy that we’ve built and the audience that we’ve built, and now we have the chance to get nimble, get weird, and who knows what we could do.
We talked about the YouTube show before, why did that appeal to you Stephanie? And what’s the response been?
Ruhle: This little cutie pie over here, my partner Ali, there is no one I love working with more than Ali. And I think that before I came here, I only worked in business TV, and I love business TV, but business TV is business content for a business audience, and it stays in that vertical. And when I came over to NBC, MSNBC, and I’ve been the business reporter and business analyst for NBC News, really doing consumer business, explaining stuff to a national audience, and really the same over at MS. And with the exception of Ali and I doing stuff together, it always feels like economic content is just in this tiny vertical where people are like, tell us what’s going on in the economy, and then they just go back to the regular stuff they cover.
We are watching in election after election — take Trump’s election in 2016, take Trump losing the election after COVID, take Trump winning the election coming out of this last election, and now, what just happened in the midterms — people vote on what affects them, not what offends them. It’s the economy, it’s affordability.
Ali and I used to shoot a linear TV show together. I love doing it, but a show, we’re presenting something to the audience and hoping they like it. And in our daily lives, I’m constantly hearing people say, I want to know this, or why aren’t people talking about that? Or when you go on Twitter or Blue Sky, people are saying, why doesn’t the media talk about X? So instead of people being frustrated or people guessing what the audience wants, this show is strictly a Q&A show.
So people who are frustrated, people who are angry, people who are curious, people who think that MS is something and it’s not. And one of the reasons we really talked about doing it is because when we covered the news during COVID, I think all of us realized that there’s a lot of stories that we miss when we’re always in New York or in DC, in a newsroom talking to one another, and suddenly we were all working from home, and we realized that small business that’s going out of business during COVID. Why? Because Home Depot and Lowe’s and Walmart are allowed to be open because they sell essential goods, but they also sell toys and surfboards and cosmetics, and they’re putting out of business mom and pop stores. That was this hugely important story, getting to tell the stories of small businesses.
We wouldn’t have known it unless we were in our communities and people were telling us that. So by us doing this YouTube show that people are calling in and saying, explain this, or you’re so hot on everybody getting protections here or this kind of regulation, it’s going to put me out of business. Or people saying, wait a minute, we can’t file our taxes for free. What does that mean? Getting to actually interact with the audience. I think this show is almost like a modern day call in radio show, which was always my fantasy, to make a call in radio show and to do it with a partner that we don’t necessarily have the same opinion on things, but I don’t think either Ali nor I have an ideology. We both have a point of view, but that point of view can change.
Velshi: I can’t commit that we haven’t changed our views over the years, but we’re not in the same place, and people don’t care, because where we disagree on things is the way normal people disagree on things. For us, we’re just talking about stuff.
Ruhle: It’s our chance, we think, to bridge this gap between everyone saying, well, can linear TV figure out how to do digital? The answer isn’t, which clips from your show were the spiciest that are going to go viral? I don’t think that’s a strategic plan for us. Our strategic plan is, this is the content that we cover. This is the news that we make. Let’s make a show on YouTube for YouTube, and hopefully it’s an audience that’s not currently watching us.
I mean the opportunity to do to have more of a two way street with the the audience, I think, has never been stronger.
Velshi: It informs what we do on TV too, right? We’re not Bloomberg and we’re not CNBC, that doesn’t mean that our viewers are not informed and know about these things, but we don’t want to miss out on a whole bunch of people who think that we’re not answering them.
Ruhle: I came from Bloomberg, which I love, but they’re talking over a huge portion of the audience, because they are talking about finance to finance experts and people need to understand money.
Ali, on election night you were on the big data board, I wanted to ask about the opportunity to present more data on on TV, because that’s become one of the most important jobs at any news organization.
Velshi: Two things. One is, I’ve always loved this opportunity. I was always the guy in the background when Steve Kornacki was doing it, but Kornacki would just never give me my shift, because the deal was he’d work 10 hours and I’d work the next 10 hours, but he’d never leave after the first 10 hours.
Ruhle: He was the relief pitcher.
Velshi: I was the relief pitcher. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I did it at CNN. I know the board, it’s the same people we’ve been using, and I would really like to evolve this into a data machine. In other words, not just election returns or polling or whatever the case is. That device you can put data into, and I can talk about anything. I can talk about where unemployment is highest, where SNAP payments are lowest, where costs are increasing, where jobs are available, where AI energy costs are hitting people. So I’m really loving this opportunity.
Ruhle: You’re bringing that to our shows, the more we can have our show rooted in data, yes, and away from the idea that it’s opinion. There’s a difference between opinion and perspective, right? So our goal is, how do you take this set of facts, this news that’s happening in the world, and now surround those facts with experts who can help you figure out what they mean, what it means, and for us to make our show and our content rooted in the data that Ali covers, that gets us further from an opinion lane that neither of us want to be in.
Velshi: And by the way, full circle. We were all in the same unit. We were in the biz tech unit. And this is what Brandy was doing, right? Because in the beginning of garbage on the internet, Brandy would come in and tell us, this is the garbage on the internet. It’s now overwhelming.
Ruhle: Brandy is the perfect example. So we’re talking about our show. We’re coming at it from an economic lens. We’re actually coming it from the audience’s lens. So when we get questions all week long from the audience, we take a look at the questions tonight, and if they’re heavy on immigration, we pull Jacob Soboroff in, if it’s heavy on misinformation, we’re going to beg Brandy to come on.
It speaks to something we talked about before, which is that under the new structure, you can kind of pick the experts that you want to bring in and figure out what are the areas we need to invest in.
Ruhle: We’re getting away from the model where “it’s a Tuesday, what correspondent are we assigning to a story that they’ve never covered before?” To me, that’s such an antiquated model of news. I’m not looking to do that. We want to bring on the people who know the stories, who know the beat, and bring them on wherever they are, wherever they work.