As MSNBC prepares to formally break away from its corporate sibling NBC, it’s leaving behind more than just the Art Deco hallways of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Although the 24-hour cable channel is best-known for opinionated stars like Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s midday hours and breaking news coverage have long relied on the journalistic muscle of NBC News, with its sprawling bureaus and amply-staffed Washington office.
That resource will be cut off later this year, when Comcast, MSNBC’s owner, spins it out along with a batch of other cable networks into a separate company, unaffiliated with the rest of the NBCUniversal family. The usual NBC correspondents who pop up on MSNBC’s air with updates on, say, the latest fight in Congress, will no longer be available.
One option would be to convert MSNBC’s lineup to progressive talk shows, but the channel’s president, Rebecca Kutler, is leaning in a different direction. On Thursday, Ms. Kutler was set to announce the channel’s first-ever Washington bureau chief: not a left-leaning partisan, but a down-the-middle print reporter with long stints at Politico and The Wall Street Journal.
Her choice, Sudeep Reddy, was most recently a senior managing editor at Politico, and his résumé is heavy with economics and Washington policy coverage.
“The MSNBC audience is cerebral and appreciates analytical, contextual reporting,” she said in an interview. “He is going to build and run a significant Washington reporting team, that to me matches with the moment — a serious moment — where real reporting will matter.”
MSNBC has never had a separate Washington bureau. Ms. Kutler has announced plans to hire more than 100 journalists for the new go-it-alone version of the channel, including new on-air correspondents to cover Capitol Hill, the State and Justice Departments and the Supreme Court — roles that were previously filled by NBC News-affiliated reporters.
At a time of contraction in the news business, it is an unusual expansion and something of a gamble. Straight-ahead TV reporting rarely attracts bigger ratings than the partisan commentary that has come to dominate much of 24-hour cable news. Ms. Maddow, for instance, remains MSNBC’s highest-rated host. Many liberal viewers also abandoned MSNBC in the aftermath of President Trump’s re-election, although its ratings have crept back up since the inauguration.
MSNBC and NBC News have long had an awkward relationship, dating back to the cable channel’s origins in 1996. The staff at NBC News often looked down on its upstart sibling. After MSNBC underwent a ratings boom in the Trump era, some NBC News journalists worried how the profitable partisanship on cable was coloring their efforts to present neutral reporting to a mass audience.
Mr. Reddy, 45, is expected to start his role in June. He will report to Scott Matthews, a former executive at CNBC and WABC-TV in New York that Ms. Kutler selected to oversee her channel’s news gathering operations.
Ms. Kutler, who was named the channel’s president in February, has made other programming changes. Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. weeknight show was canceled. Jen Psaki, who served as press secretary to former President Biden, took on a 9 p.m. show that airs between Tuesdays and Fridays.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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