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And now, the main event…

On Wednesday morning, MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler treated around 15 media reporters to a tour of the network’s new studios at the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street. The trade press event, which featured a several-tables-long charcuterie display and summit-style interviews with Joe and Mika, Jen Psaki, Stephanie Ruhle, and Michael Steele, was part of a broader messaging effort for the impending MS NOW rebrand necessitated by NBCUniversal’s spinoff of its cable channels. Versant, the new parentco, has also unveiled a $20 million ad campaign to preempt any confusion around the name change. In one spot, Rachel Maddow reads the preamble to the Constitution; another features Maya Angelou reciting a poem at the U.N.

The reporters appeared to appreciate the spread, since I’m told they took much of it home. But the messaging seems to have resonated most effectively with the MSNBC employees themselves. Most of the sources I spoke to there this week said they were optimistic about the network’s new independence and even invigorated by the quality of the new studios and the esprit de corps among their colleagues. For months, Kutler and her boss, Versant C.E.O. Mark Lazarus, have sold the cable spin as the dawn of the network’s golden age—noting that MSNBC can now invest its $500 million-plus annual profits back into itself, funding new digital products and live experiences—and the staff mostly seems to have chugged that Kool Aid.

Over the long term, the reality may prove more depressing. Brian Roberts offloaded his declining cable assets for a reason, and MS NOW’s path toward a robust post-linear future is a long putt. In essence, Kutler & Co. would need to sustain linear profits amid industry decline and use that capital to transform their still-archaic digital product into a pillar of progressive media—a tall order for a cable news company that draws around a million mostly septuagenarian viewers every night while younger audiences get their Mamdani discourse fix from other sources on other platforms.

The more likely scenario, as I have written before, is that Kutler will try to maintain a healthy-enough linear business until Nexstar or Sinclair comes knocking, or until a private equity firm like Apollo takes over and expedites the value extraction. Or maybe David Zaslav successfully splits WBD before the Ellisons get hold of it, and there is a shotgun public markets marriage between Versant and Gunnar Wiedenfels’s debt-ridden Discovery Global.

In the meantime, Kutler may stand up a meaningful podcast network and live-events business in the process—some Ari Melber stans will pay as much as $1k to attend MSNBC’s daylong conferences—but that revenue can’t cover the losses brought on by linear’s decline. (Nothing can ever truly replace the cable money spigot, alas…) This, of course, is the story of late-stage pay TV; even ESPN, with its NFL, NCAAF,  and NBA rights, faces a steep climb toward post-cable durability.

Inside the building, however, that future still seems eons away. And for TV news veterans who could never countenance taking a job at Fox News or Bari Weiss’s CBS, much less being offered one, there are few better places to go. Kutler, an ambitious and competitive programmer in the Zucker mold, is widely seen as the best leader a cable news network could expect to have in its smoke-and-embers era. She has made real investments in staff, studios, and production infrastructure, which has been reassuring to the former 30 Rock denizens who feared they might be forced to anchor from barstools in front of projector screens. And as CNN continues to plod along in its ennui, MS NOW at least seems to beat the alternative.

There is also some upside potential. MSNBC has lost more than a third of its audience so far this year, which executives attribute to the usual post-presidential-election drought—a trend cable networks bucked only in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first presidency. Most of Kutler’s long-term planning revolves around the network’s strategy for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election, which should yield greater engagement. Conveniently, this week’s MS NOW unveiling coincided with the start of a new chapter in progressive politics that has already buoyed spirits: On election night, MSNBC drew an audience of nearly 3 million, beating Fox in total viewers, which almost never happens, and besting CNN by the widest margin since 2019. Perhaps that’s a harbinger.

As always, however, the more salient detail was that a mere 15 percent of MSNBC’s audience was below the age of 55. That data point underlines the true challenge before Kutler. Notably, while MSNBC and CNN suffer double-digit annual ratings losses, Fox News has grown its audience by nearly 20 percent this year, attracted a slate of blue-chip advertisers, and maintained its influence over America’s conservatives even amid an increasingly fragmented media landscape. No one without an AARP card would argue that MSNBC maintains a similar influence over progressives, whose affinities span a buffet of alternative sources and platforms. At the very least, Kutler needs to bring MS NOW closer to that level of influence on the left, then introduce a suite of digital products that can extend its influence to a wider— and hopefully, younger—audience.

Needless to say, one night of Maddow a week won’t get her there. Increasingly, MSNBCers wonder aloud about who Kutler might try to acquire or license—Meidas Touch? Crooked Media? The Bulwark? It’s hard to look at the ESPN-McAfee or Fox-Portnoy deal and not think that MS will follow a similar playbook. Until then, the existing bench just seems happy to have a place to call home.

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