Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of the American media industry. Tonight, we go inside the halls of 30 Rock to get the real story behind a leadership shakeup at NBC News, and what it portends for the future of the business. Plus, some news and notes on Chris Licht’s new dayside schedule.

Conde’s views on that future also reflect certain undeniable secular trends—the inexorable decline of linear television, the rise of digital subscription businesses, the leveraging of brand loyalty—among others. In private conversation, Conde can humbly acknowledge that NBC News, despite its history and massive infrastructure, isn’t immune to these changes. In fact, those attributes make it vulnerable.

In his view, sources who have spoken with him say, NBC News’s future is not built around a core television network—a dying though still lucrative asset. It is, instead, a constellation of brands like Today and Dateline and NBC Nightly News that exist across various linear and digital platforms, with myriad revenue streams, all of which can be judged by their own P&L and require different strategies. In this worldview, NBC News is less of an operating business and masterbrand than a holding company for its consumer-facing properties—a multimedia Conde Nast or LVMH or MacAndrews & Forbes. “Cesar isn’t thinking about one coherent editorial strategy,” one high-level NBC News executive told me. “He’s thinking about systems, about outcomes.”

After all, Conde didn’t just replace Oppenheim with a less experienced and presumably less expensive executive. (Alas, like magazines before them, that is the trend in the shrinking industry of television news.) Instead, he eliminated his position and split it into three roles, with Libby Leist overseeing the Today franchise and its e-commerce business; Janelle Rodriguez overseeing Nightly News and the network’s streaming service, NBC News Now, a surprisingly monetizable hit; and Blumenstein hired to run the remaining brands, like Meet the Press and Dateline, as well as the core newsgathering effort upon which this whole enterprise depends. All three will report directly to Conde. “The job that Noah had has been eliminated,” another high-level NBC News executive told me.

From the corporate vantage point, this “realignment,” as Conde calls it, has a certain logic. “It’s uber-practical,” one NBC insider said. He is breaking out Today, with its lucrative advertising and ecommerce businesses, and NBC News Now, the fast-growing streaming service, and giving himself direct oversight over both businesses. From the editorial perspective, however, it’s hard not to feel that NBC News is being turned into something smaller, and that the house of Brinkley and Brokaw and Brian Williams isn’t primarily an august journalistic institution so much as a balkanizing portfolio comprised of a couple of hit shows, a lifestyle brand, and a streaming service. How else to explain the absence of a captain who can create a unified editorial strategy for the network, manage the talent or make the tough calls on how to cover a crisis?

An era keeps ending, and Oppenheim’s departure is yet another sign of the times. Indeed, Shapiro, Capus, and Lack, and their contemporaries across broadcast and cable news, had largely come up as executive producers. They were intimately involved in day-to-day editorial decisions, and they thrived off the competitive energy that comes with winning a news cycle. This rearing made them natural talent-whisperers, and often garnered them large measures of credibility in organizations where the talent is out front and the numbers people eat lunch with the nerds. But times change in all businesses, and they sure as hell are changing now in this one.

On Wednesday, Licht unveiled a new dayside strategy that aims to infuse the often lackluster, desk-anchor format with what he described to Variety as a more “kinetic” energy, with multiple anchors spending more time on their feet. John Berman, Kate Bolduan, and Sara Sidner will co-host a three-hour morning block from 9 a.m. to noon, while Jim Sciutto, Boris Sanchez, and Brianna Keilar will co-host another three-hour afternoon block from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. The noon hour will continue to be hosted by John King, though sources familiar with Licht’s plans tell me his chair may eventually be given to Dana Bash, who is coincidentally his ex-wife.

This new strategy may or may not infuse some much-needed energy into daytime cable. “The goal we have is to take an incredible newsgathering operation that has so much information coming in at all hours from all over the world, and, in an authentic way, reflect that energy on air,” Licht told Variety. There is presumably nowhere to go but up. In 2022, CNN averaged just over half a million viewers in total day, and just over 120,000 in the advertiser-relevant 25-to-54 year-old demo—its lowest-rated year in history.

Either way, it’s hard for many industry insiders to see it as anything other than an ongoing rearranging of the deck chairs. “The lowly Pirates have switched their third baseman with their first baseman and moved their shortstop to second base while their catcher will now pitch and their pitcher will now catch. And the fate of the second baseman is undecided,” one veteran television executive quipped. And as with so much at CNN these days, the move is also a cost-cutting effort, since fewer shows means fewer production expenses. CNN may not be turning into Cheddar, but it is increasingly looking like early-era HLN in many respects.

In that regard, however, Licht is fulfilling the expectations of his bosses at Warner Bros. Discovery. And, as with Conde and NBC News, there is a sense that the nature of the business has changed considerably, and the product with it. “It all seems small,” one veteran news executive texted upon seeing the new lineup. “None of this changes the equation.”