Crooked Media’s partnership with MS NOW officially begins Saturday with the launch of a compilation show featuring the best of the progressive digital company’s suite of podcasts. But it kicked off in spirit last week when MS NOW host Ayman Mohyeldin filled in for Tommy Vietor on “Pod Save the World.”
“We are now colleagues, not just at MS where I’m a contributor, but now there’s this Crooked-MS” relationship, co-host Ben Rhodes said as he introduced Mohyeldin, who co-hosts MS NOW’s “The Weekend: Primetime.” “We’re crossing the streams, as they say.”
The partnership will showcase “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer; “Assembly Required” host Stacey Abrams; “What a Day” host Jane Coaston; and more during a 9 p.m. hourlong block of programming on Saturdays, beginning Feb. 28. “Crooked on MS NOW,” the network’s head of digital Madeleine Haeringer told TheWrap, is part of president Rebecca Kutler’s aggressive investment in digital media as MS NOW cements its independence from NBC News following parent company Versant’s split from Comcast at the beginning of the year.
“They have a deep bench of beloved hosts that make sense of current events for our respective audience,” said Haeringer, an NBC and MSNBC veteran who joined Crooked Media in 2023 as EVP and general manager of news and programming before returning to the cable network last year. “They bring a lot of institutional political perspective, and so it’s just kind of a natural fit.”
For now, the Crooked partnership is limited to repurposing Crooked’s content onto MS NOW’s airwaves. But it points to a future business model that can be mutually beneficial for linear cable networks and their digital counterparts. MS NOW can beef up its roster with established progressive voices who have their own followings on podcasts and YouTube. And the Crooked crew gains another platform to reach audiences, some of whom may check out “Pod Save America” and other shows as a result. It’s not a stretch to envision MS NOW similarly teaming up with The Bulwark — the site’s Tim Miller and Sam Stein are already familiar to the network’s viewers — or perhaps MeidasTouch, the growing progressive digital network.
MS NOW is also not the only platform jumping onto the podcast bandwagon, as streamers and networks alike are seizing on the medium to reach a broader audience or tap into new ones. Netflix has partnered with several companies like Spotify and iHeartMedia to bring video podcasts to its platform, and streamers have bet big on companion podcasts for its hit shows. CNN has also announced plans to air some of Lemonada’s news-adjacent video podcasts on its “All Access” streaming tier.
The melding of podcast and cable personalities is already playing out on MS NOW, where popular podcaster Pablo Torre has become a regular on “Morning Joe,” and as hosts like Symone Sanders Townsend, Eugene Daniels and Nicolle Wallace have launched podcasts this past year. Such cross-pollination is also playing out in the conservative media space; Fox News struck a deal last year with the conservative “Ruthless” podcast, which led to its stable of anchors joining the network as contributors.
“I think that the more we normalize the voices of people in the space who are facilitating those conversations and giving those perspectives, the more we are able to compete with very aggressive right-wing media,” Crooked Media CEO Lucinda Treat told TheWrap.
How the MS Now-Crooked marriage began
Treat said Crooked Media had been approached by various networks over the years about different forms of partnerships, but those offers sometimes included attempts to create a new show instead of relying on the company’s stable of successful podcasts. What made MS NOW stand out, she said, was the relationships the “Pod Save America” hosts had established over several years of network appearances and the opportunity to reach an audience potentially unfamiliar with its suite of shows.
“The way legacy media has worked, I think they shied away from too much political conversation in many, many ways,” she said. “I think some are realizing that that is unnecessary, and that the political conversation is really engaging to the audience.”
An outright acquisition was never discussed, Treat said.
Haeringer said the network’s model for deciding who to partner with focuses on whether a company has spent time building a dedicated audience and whether it has an established live-event business. MS NOW has hosted a series of live fan events, including two years of “MSNBC Live” events in New York, while Crooked Media hosted its “Crooked Con” conference over two days in November in Washington D.C., which included appearances by MS NOW’s “The Briefing” host Jen Psaki and Sanders Townsend, co-host of “The Weeknight.”
The idea of a Crooked partnership arose as the network considered how to accelerate its push into digital, pointing to the “Pod Save America” hosts’ appearances during events like the State of the Union and the chemistry between network anchors and Crooked personalities, along with the network’s audience response.
“There’s a lot of crossover and familiarity,” Haeringer said. “I know a lot of our audience love them, and we love working with them — shared values and expertise — and it’s really organic.”
It helps many of their hosts share resume boxes. “Pod Save America” hosts Favreau, Lovett, Vietor and Pfeffier are all alums of the Obama administration, as is Psaki. Crooked Media’s “Runaway Country” host Alex Wagner hosted a primetime show in Rachel Maddow’s timeslot up until last year. Rhodes, another Obama administration alum, is an MS NOW contributor, and Stacey Abrams, a newer Crooked Media host, blanketed MS NOW during her Georgia gubernatorial campaigns in 2018 and 2022.
The two companies have highlighted those dynamics ahead of the show’s Saturday launch. Mohyeldin’s guest-hosting appearance on Rhodes’ “Pod Saves the World” came a day after the compilation show was announced, while MS NOW anchors Townsend and Daniels appeared on “Pod Save America” on Monday to discuss the State of the Union and promote their new MS NOW podcast “Clock It.”
The “Pod Save America” hosts also appeared on MS NOW to analyze the State of the Union, and they’ll appear across the networks throughout the week.
What success looks like
The hourlong broadcast will feature roughly 10-minute segments highlighting Crooked Media’s roster of programs that tackle the news of the week, filling in an hour of programming the network hasn’t prioritized. While ratings will play a role in determining the program’s success, both companies plan to closely look at the broadcast’s digital numbers and whether there’s an indication MS NOW viewers flock to Crooked’s shows.
MS NOW has already experimented with injecting podcasts into the cable line-up, airing nearly 20 episodes of Wallace’s podcast “The Best People” on its airwaves throughout the last year. The podcast’s most recent episode, a conversation with actor Robert De Niro, has already garnered more than 680,000 views on YouTube, and Haeringer said she plans to bring it to air and expects it to perform just as well.
“There isn’t a set, ‘Oh, it’s got to hit this number,’ but really getting the interest across different platforms,” she said, pointing to the robust “Pod Save America” YouTube presence of 1.2 million subscribers. “So ‘does it hold our audience’ is what we’re seeing, and we’re confident it will.”
The partnership is limited to the compilation show, with no specific expansion planned between the two companies. But how the Crooked show performs could determine what such external partnerships will look like at MS NOW.
Status reported earlier this month that MS NOW executives were “aggressively having conversations” with other digital media companies for partnerships and eyed the Bulwark, the Sarah Longwell-led outlet whose contributors often appear across MS NOW, as one potential opportunity.
Haeringer said she wasn’t in any active conversations with other outlets and had not spoken to the Bulwark, but she noted Kutler’s eagerness to expand the network’s programming and meet audiences where they’re consuming content — whether on TV or online.
“We’re happy to talk to all sorts of people about future partnerships,” she said. “This is the first one in this space that has come to fruition.”
But as opportunities for partnerships between progressive media organizations present themselves, she said one thing remained a north star: making sure their values were consistent with MS NOW’s progressive brand and giving audiences a perspective they couldn’t find elsewhere.
“People who have experience in politics and real-world experience in the administration, who can point to how things were done, how things should be done, are very thoughtful about institutions and how our democracy works — that is what we’re looking for, and that is what our audience craves,” she said. “That kind of insider knowledge and expertise and finding other organizations that bring that to bear is really important.”
