Even if you’re a casual consumer of MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, you know the names: anchors like Chris Hayes, Stephanie Ruhl, and yes, the one and only Rachel Maddow. The network has built a stable of talent who’ve amassed a massive number of casual viewers, plenty of fans … and more than a few obsessives.
Now, the network’s president, Rebecca Kutler, is looking to build that entire audience into something more akin to a fandom—turning casual viewers and fanatics alike, whether on TV or online, into paying members of an MS NOW media universe.
To do it, she’s launching an ambitious subscription program, called Membership, designed to connect MS NOW consumers much more directly to the Hayeses and Maddows of the world. Sure, plenty of news providers now offer subscriptions, WIRED included (and by the way, you can subscribe here). But what struck me about Kutler and Co.’s efforts was both their methodical approach—they surveyed 18,000 people before landing on a final offering—and their resolute focus on MS NOW’s deep bench of talent as the locus of their paid program. In a world where influencers are the new newscasters, and linear TV is in an inevitable decline, MS NOW is diving directly into the breach: applying the influencer playbook to build a sustainable business that’s future-proofed … at least until the next great audience pivot.
I caught up with Kutler at WIRED’s New York studios, just days before MS NOW’s subscription launch. We talked about turning TV talent into fandom magnets, beating Fox, and whether media consolidation is actually good news for the network.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Rebecca, thank you so much for being here today. Start by telling me when you joined MSNBC. What’s the timeline?
REBECCA KUTLER: I think it was right before the midterms in 2022. I had grown up at CNN. I spent more than 20 years there. I left earlier in 2022, and some folks that I knew and really respected reached out from then MSNBC, and they talked about one of those jobs that has a lot of running room and is a little ambiguous, but in the best way. I thought, “Yeah, let’s check it out.” I started at MSNBC, now MS NOW, running their digital businesses, basically all their nonlinear businesses.
It gave me a real opportunity to learn the place, but also think about what are the missed opportunities that we could take advantage of in the next few years.
At some point in your tenure, you took on the whole thing.
Yes.
What were those big challenges that you identified when you looked at the whole portfolio and thought to yourself, “What are we going to do here?”
One of the things that immediately struck me when I came over was the fandom.
I had worked in other newsrooms. I have friends who work in other newsrooms. I love the news and love what we do, but I had never worked at a place where the audience really sees themselves as fans, with a deep connection to talent.
When I joined MS, it was also at the same time Jen Psaki joined, and we had known each other a little from a previous life. So we went out into the field together and did a few pretty straightforward field reporting pieces. And I’ve walked through airports over my career with a lot of different anchors and newspeople, but I’ve never had the experience of walking through with Jen and seeing the [attention she got]. That’s why she was a great fit for MS. She’s someone people were behind and were rooting for, and had a deep connection with.
When you think about Rachel Maddow and how she lands. You’re very close to this industry. If you talk to anyone in publishing and ask them where they would ideally like to debut their book, I think most of them would say The Rachel Maddow Show. There’s a reason for that: The audience loyalty and engagement with Rachel has been proven over decades.
It’s funny, when she shares a WIRED story on social media, the traffic to that story and the engagement on her social media around WIRED is crazy. I can tell you firsthand looking at the analytics, you can feel it.
I want to ask you more about talent in a minute, but that brings me to this Membership program you’re launching. I’m going to read from the press release, which I very rarely do. You will offer “new opportunities for members to interact directly with the brand’s trusted journalists, exclusive community features to engage with each other, a new roster of contributors and experts, original creator content, new verticals that explore how news and politics impacts everyday life, and 24/7 access to livestreams and television programming.”
In layman’s terms, if someone’s a MS NOW viewer, they watch it on TV sometimes, they see it on social media, what should they expect from this? What are they getting that they’re not already getting by having cable TV?
I want to answer your question directly, but I just don’t want to assume your audience is the MS NOW audience. So if you’ll allow me 30 seconds …
Give us your best pitch.
We launched as a new brand about a year ago. People traditionally see us as this cable channel, and that’s great. We have a huge cable audience. We’re actually right now the number two most-watched basic cable channel.
Who’s number one?
Fox.
I see. OK. We might talk more about that later.
But that’s just one piece of our business. We have, right now, a digital business before we even launch what we’re launching this week, that has more uniques than places like Axios, Politico, The Atlantic. People spend more time with us digitally than places like the Washington Post and NPR.
And on YouTube, we have been quite efficient at building out our presence in that space. We get more clicks on YouTube than ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News combined.
I say all of that to say we are starting from a position of strength. What we are excited about, and why we’re launching this product, is all those digital things I just mentioned, we don’t have a way to catch all those people if they’re not going to be watching cable.
Got it.
It’s taking our current superfans who watch us on linear and giving them more. So what are they going to get? They’re going to get direct access to our talent. Seven days a week at noon and at 6:00 pm, if you are a member of the MS NOW community, you can hop on and directly interact with one of our anchors or one of our reporters.
On Monday it’s going to be Rachel Maddow, and then you go through the week. You’re going to hear from Michael Steele, you’re going to hear from Jen Psaki, you’re going to hear from Reverend Al Sharpton. You’re going to hear from the people that you know and love from watching them on MS NOW and have the opportunity to ask them your question directly, and not just interact with our talent, but also interact with each other.
When we started this process around a year and a half ago, we didn’t just sit in a conference room and think, “Hmm, let’s make another commodity news app.” Because let’s be honest, a lot of that already exists. What we did was actually start from a place of product research. We went out to 18,000 people. We did surveys, we did in-person interviews, and we spent time taking that research and getting to where we are this week.
What I most want people to know is, what you see this week will look vastly different six months from now and a year from now if we’re doing our jobs right. What we need to do is build and learn and test and add investment and expand where we need to, but not really think that we’re going to get it all right on day one, but give ourselves that latitude.
Is the goal to pull linear viewers onto digital, or is it to better engage the digital audience, or both?
It’s both. All those people consuming us on YouTube, on digital, on social, in audio, 90 percent of those people do not regularly consume us on linear television. So a big function of this product is to say, “Hey, you’re watching YouTube videos all the time of Lawrence O’Donnell. Maybe you’re not someone who’s going to be a cable subscriber. But can you come join our community in another capacity? Can we create a product that entices you to be part of an MS NOW community, even if you’re someone who’s reluctant to become a cable customer?”
I would say that, for the average person, if you ask them, “Fox News, MS NOW, who do those networks reach?” I would say Fox News reaches Republicans, and that’s who has it on TV, that’s who’s going to that website. I would say MS NOW reaches progressives, Democrats, left-leaning people. Is that a stated goal for you, or do you want that tent to be bigger?
Is the audience for MS NOW different from the audience for Fox? Of course it is. There’s probably a small amount of overlap, but not a lot, and that’s OK.
For example, when I think forward to election night, I gotta say, I think there’s nowhere I’d rather hang out on election night than at our table with Rachel and Nicolle [Wallace] and Lawrence and Chris [Hayes] and Michael [Steele] and everyone.
What we try to do is be smart, respect our audience, and be a fun place, and a place where, again, Michael Steele is a big part of our election night. He was chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Right.
We have a broad range of views, but I think they all fall under that pro-democracy banner.
Are you competitive? Do you want to beat Fox? Do you want to see that number one?
Look, I am a pretty competitive person. I just see who our competition is as wider than that typical cable landscape.
I want to build a great product right now and have a large membership community, and I want to make sure that we are competing on every battleground.
That is yes, absolutely on cable, yes on digital, yes on YouTube, yes in audio. I think that because of the life that this brand lived under previous ownership, there were times when our wings were clipped a little from a business perspective, and that wasn’t—if I was sitting in the seats of the leadership team at NBC, I might have made the same decisions.
When you’re working for the very large, very successful companies that NBCUniversal and Comcast are, they need to look at the whole company and figure out where best to invest their dollars. So what they did makes sense for them. But now we’re lucky to be a part of Versant, and Versant has several pieces of their portfolio that generate a lot of cash.
What is Versant, for those who may not know?
Versant is the spinoff, so a spinout, of NBCUniversal. For folks that weren’t following along day by day, around a year ago, NBCUniversal spun out a series of businesses. Those include what is now MS NOW, CNBC, brands like E!—you know, Live from the Red Carpet—and then golf.
We are now part of a company that is incentivized to invest the money that we earn as MS NOW back into MS NOW. We’re just no longer part of a company that has to invest in theme parks and other things that, for that company, made a lot of sense.
I don’t think it’s a secret that cable news audiences are declining, and I’m going to ask this in the bluntest possible way: That’s an older audience, so what do you do when they die?
I am not blind to the long-term challenges. That’s why we are investing in digital. But do I think the cable business right now for MS NOW is quite healthy? I do.
Our average viewer watches nine hours a week.
That is a lot of MS NOW.
Do I wake up in a panic in the middle of the night? No. Do I know there are long-term challenges? Yes.
What do you wake up at night worrying about? Working in media and journalism is hard. It’s a hard business, and these are really difficult transformations to try to undertake, and to undertake successfully. What’s the hardest part of this for you right now?
What I wake up angsty about sometimes is I know we have this guest or that guest coming up, but how can we upgrade? How can we make it better? What is the better question? What is the better way in?
I might be old-school when I say this, but I think content always wins. Every single race.
I want to ask more about talent. You do have some real fandom magnets. I think one of the biggest challenges in publishing today, especially on digital, is that it is so noisy. There is so much competition. It’s not just news, but it’s everything on someone’s Instagram feed. How do you encourage your journalists, your talent, to break through that in a digital context?
I’ll just pick on Chris Hayes for a minute here. Because there’s almost no time that I talk to Chris Hayes that I don’t then hang up the phone or walk out of his office and think to myself, “That guy’s brain is huge.”
I think that’s the answer to the question of how do you break through? Every brand and every place in the media has to figure out what their breakthrough is. Look, there’s people who want to break through by showing cat videos all day. People want to break through by writing outrageous headlines that aren’t really based in facts.
Yes.
Where I want MS NOW to break through is being brainiacs, is coming to the table with something that is intellectually interesting, that is showing me something or teaching me something or adding value to a news story in a way I hadn’t thought about it before, of drawing on their experience, decades of experience working in the room, being in the room where it happened.
What has the experience been like of transitioning some of the more TV-comfortable talent that you have, who are accustomed to doing a cable news show, and saying to them, “Now you do these interactive sessions with our audience, now you do TikTok, now you participate in these other parts of the ecosystem”?
One of my rules is: don’t do anything that feels weird for you. What I mean by that is, if you in your own life don’t use TikTok, I don’t recommend trying to become a TikToker. It’s going to land weird. We’ve seen it. So what I have encouraged our shows, our hosts, everyone in the MS NOW family, to do is don’t try to be everywhere. Don’t try to be everything.
I mean, a great example, Symone Sanders [Townsend] is fantastic at TikTok and Instagram because she grew up in those spaces and knows those audiences. That might not be the same for Lawrence O’Donnell. Lawrence O’Donnell is a huge hit on YouTube.
What has Trump 2.0 been like over there? Have you seen an audience bump? Have you seen fatigue? The challenge with the story of Trump 2.0 is that there are a thousand stories a day. How are you thinking about reaching your audience in a way that can grab them and hold them?
What I want our audience to know is that we are who we are, and we’re proud of who we are, and you can come to us on any platform at any time and trust that you are getting our best reporting and our best analysis without fear.
We haven’t talked about it yet, but as part of the spinoff, we had to build our own newsroom. What we tried to do is build our newsroom knowing the moment. We’re not trying to be commodity news. We’re trying to build an absolutely kickass DC newsroom, and I think we’ve done that.
MS NOW is one of the very few media brands in growth mode right now. It’s impressive.
I’m curious about your take on the possibility of a merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which would place CNN and CBS News under one owner. Would that consolidation be good for you? Does this help you even if the broader implications can be troubling?
In a functioning healthy democracy, you need a very healthy free and fair press. So I am rooting for better, stronger newsrooms. I worked most of my career at CNN, and while they might be technically a competitor or rival now, the world is a better place with a stronger CNN.
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