Ali Vitali isn’t naturally a morning person, but fortified by an early bedtime and stockpiled cans of sparkling orange-flavored Celsius energy drinks, she makes her gig work. “I’m contractually a morning person,” she said just after her show, aptly titled “Way Too Early,” wrapped one morning this month at 6 a.m.
Ali Vitali isn’t naturally a morning person, but fortified by an early bedtime and stockpiled cans of sparkling orange-flavored Celsius energy drinks, she makes her gig work. “I’m contractually a morning person,” she said just after her show, aptly titled “Way Too Early,” wrapped one morning this month at 6 a.m.
Vitali, 35, is the first daily face of a new version of MSNBC, one that — as of Saturday — has a different name and a different logo. Nothing about her show, her sleep schedule or her broader remit as the network’s resident Congress-whisperer will change. But viewers now find her on a network with a peacock-less logo and a new name: MS Now.
NBC owner Comcast started late last year spinning off its cable news networks MSNBC and CNBC, plus other entertainment and sports brands such as the Golf Channel and USA Network, into a new company called Versant. While CNBC is keeping its name, MSNBC is assuming a fresh moniker — short for “My Source for News, Opinion, and the World.”
To thrive without the deep bench and financial backing of NBC, MS Now intends to keep serving up liberal opinion and news analysis in prime time to its Donald Trump-fatigued, Rachel Maddow-obsessed viewers. But without the support of the 99-year-old network with which it has always shared a name, it has to figure out how to gather and report the news that fuels its shows, website, podcasts, and social media.
To replace NBC News’s roster of reporters and hosts, MS Now is building a newsroom of its own. The network says it is the rare process of bulking up in a news ecosystem battered by persistent layoffs and shrinking resources.
The network hired Scott Matthews from New York’s WABC as senior vice president of newsgathering and tapped Politico Senior Managing Editor Sudeep Reddy as its Washington bureau chief. After Reddy joined in June, he was flooded with emails from journalists looking for work or excited about building something new. “There were days where, between every meeting, I would get another handful of emails from people inquiring,” he said. “I have 300 backlogged messages of people I still want to meet with.”
Altogether, Reddy has hired more than three dozen reporters in Washington, including Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Leonnig from The Washington Post, who soon after starting at the network broke the story — alongside former NBC reporter Ken Dilanian — that Trump border czar Tom Homan had been caught in a bribery sting operation. (No charges were filed.) The reporters hired across the country include NBC misinformation reporter Brandy Zadrozny and national correspondents Jacob Soboroff and David Noriega; it also poached Eugene Daniels from Politico, Rosa Flores from CNN, and Jacqueline Alemany from The Post.
Steve Kornacki, the data whiz who has been an election mainstay for years, decamped from MSNBC for NBC News and NBC Sports ahead of the corporate schism. Ali Velshi filled in on election night and won the network high marks with viewers. MSNBC saw 3.04 million viewers, edging out the usually dominant Fox News and nearly doubling CNN’s viewership.
Partnerships with AccuWeather and Comcast’s Sky News, plus continued crossover programming with CNBC, will replace the weather and global news that NBC previously supplied.
The editorial independence that comes with the split has been a draw for some of the reporters newly hired on, according to several MS Now and NBC staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the split candidly. For nearly 30 years, MSNBC functioned as what one staffer described as the “editorial page” of the NBC News operation — a home for opinion and analysis while NBC reporters did the heavy lifting of gathering the day’s news. MS Now aims to break its own stories while maintaining the opinion-driven prime-time lineup that draws its loyal audience. “Nobody’s calling our shots except good news judgment about what the public needs to know,” Leonnig said.
Some reporters said the split has also meant freedom from NBC’s internal politics. One staffer described NBC as having had “entirely too many people and not enough people” — meaning sometimes elbows-out competition for high-profile stories that touched on overlapping beats.
Senior White House correspondent Vaughn Hillyard, who came over from NBC News, said the opinion hosts, such as Nicole Wallace — the former communications director for President George W. Bush who hosts “Deadline: White House” — understand this split between news and opinion. “It’s not like Nicole is ever pushing me to be anything other than … a reporter,” he said. “Sometimes she asks, ‘How can Republicans be continuing to stand by Donald Trump at this moment?’ But she doesn’t expect me to say, ‘Yeah, that’s wild!’ No, I can provide my reporting and I’ve been covering the guy for 10 years.”
But building a news operation from scratch, alongside a major branding change, is no easy feat. And there have been growing pains.
One staffer said there was a recent ordeal when a reporter hired to work for MS Now had a scoop and staffers were nervous about discussing it in Slack where NBC News personnel might also be able to see it. Since then, MS Now has a separate Slack workspace and decamped to its own office spaces.
The name change has stirred quiet skepticism internally, with staffers describing heartburn that CNBC is keeping its name but MSNBC has had to rebrand. (CNBC technically stands for “Consumer News and Business Channel.”) One staffer said they don’t love the new name, anticipating an “awkward stage” where critics rib them for it. Others groused about the backronym and the new logo.
Still, they said the product would look essentially the same: “All their favorite people are still on at the exact same time,” one person said. “It’s just a different graphic with no peacock.”
For some staffers, changing offices has been the only real disruption — not only in the Washington bureau but also the New York headquarters operation’s move from its famous digs at 30 Rockefeller Center to a new space in Times Square that the company has dubbed “summer camp” because it’s a short-term solution. “Leaving 30 Rock’s a drag,” said one staffer. “But if these are my worst problems, then fine.”
Overall, the transition has been smoother than many expected. Hillyard said his sources at the White House haven’t treated him any differently. “For a good number of us, we’ve been around longer than they have in Trumpworld,” he said. “The White House knows that I’m Vaughn. They know each of us individually.”
Network President Rebecca Kutler has emphasized continuity. “Same Mission. New Name,” reads the tagline of MS Now’s start-up marketing effort. The campaign, which debuted during the network’s election night coverage, cost $20 million, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to The Post.
The biggest question for Kutler and her team is whether MS Now can maintain or even grow its audience. The network’s viewers skew older, and cord-cutting continues to erode the carriage-fee model that funds how cable networks operate. While the spin-off gives MS Now more autonomy, it doesn’t solve the fundamental financial uncertainties facing it and other cable giants.
Tom Rosenstiel, a University of Maryland journalism professor and former executive director of the American Press Institute, said MS Now faces the challenge of building a credible news operation under a brand that audiences have come to see as offering primarily partisan opinion.
“They can’t claim to be NBC anymore,” said Rosenstiel. “Whatever reporters they hire are under a brand that is essentially partisan. So they’re going to have to somehow hire reporters and establish that their brand is a little more diverse than MSNBC is at night.”
To counter the perception that the network is watched almost exclusively by liberals, MS Now shared data — based on Nielsen and MRI-Simmons data — showing that its audience consists of 50 percent registered Democrats, 26 percent Republicans and 24 percent independents. That data has not only guided the network internally, it said, but also helped it court new hires.
Jane Hall, an associate professor at American University’s School of Communication, said MS Now would be wise to give loyal MSNBC viewers what they are used to. “If you like MSNBC, I think one of the things that you like is that they have these strong hosts, these hosts obviously have a point of view, and at the same time, the reporting is often used to back it up,” she said. Viewers will be sensitive, she added, to any perceived bending to new corporate pressures or to Donald Trump’s attacks on the media.
For now, MS Now is leaning into its energy as something of a born-again start-up. Leadership has involved reporters in hiring decisions, asking them to recommend colleagues and help build out the team — an unusual approach in an industry where hiring is typically top-down. “They made us a part of the building process,” Vitali said.
On the Friday before the government shutdown ended, Vitali previewed the shutdown chaos on her early-morning show before trekking to the Russell Senate Office Building for an oat milk matcha latte and her morning live shot from the building’s rotunda.
While Vitali checked her phone, accompanying freelance photographer Shannon Finney spotted Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota), the Senate majority leader, approaching for a Fox News interview and tipped Vitali off with a nudge and a whisper. Vitali jackrabbitted toward Thune, texted her control room, and motioned to cameraman Tyler Smith, a new Versant hire, to grab the roving camera.
Vitali had to catch her breath after her stand-up with Thune ended. “Television is a team sport,” she said.
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