Chris Hayes was packing up his office at 30 Rock when he came across a photo of his daughter that he brought in after landing a primetime show 12 years ago. “Any time you’re moving, you’re going to have a moment” of “sentiment or nostalgia,” he said.
Hayes and company are relocating to temporary studios at 229 W. 43rd St., the former home of the New York Times and BuzzFeed, as the cable network formalizes its split from NBC and officially rebrands on Nov. 15 as MS NOW, which stands for “My Source for News, Opinion and the World.”
Getting audiences to accept its new name — which received its fair share of ridicule when it was first unveiled — is just one of the challenges the network faces as it sets about convincing loyal viewers that the rebrand and a new, spun-off parent doesn’t mean its priorities are changing.
That’s been the pitch so far, as the network rolled out a spot last month with the “Morning Joe” crew: “Same mission, same place, new name,” said co-host Joe Scarborough. MSNBC plans to use Tuesday’s election night broadcast as an opportunity to reinforce the branding change.
“The lights and chairs are going to change, but the mission stays the same: How do we help people get better and smarter and report the truth every night?” host Stephanie Ruhle told TheWrap. “And if we can cover the truth, and have the best reporting and the best analysis,” she added, “the audience is going to find us wherever we are.”
Hayes echoed that point. “From the viewers’ perspective, it’s the same people under lights on the same channel,” he said. “They don’t have to do anything.”
It was nearly a year ago that Comcast began the process of spinning off NBCUniversal’s cable networks and digital assets into a new company, Versant, which has forced MSNBC to grow its own newsgathering operation after sharing one with NBC News throughout its nearly 30-year existence. MSNBC is retaining some stars who had double duty across broadcast and cable, such as correspondent Jacob Soboroff, while losing others, like go-to election data analyst Steve Kornacki. The cable network has also been aggressively staffing up with high-profile hires, like Pulitzer Prize-winner Carol Leonnig, who are already making their presence felt on air.
Executives have framed the split as a way to unlock the potential of their cable and digital offerings, coming at a time of cord-cutting and linear cable industry headwinds. MSNBC, which started off as a partnership between Microsoft and NBC, emerged in the George W. Bush years as a leading progressive voice in primetime and can be found holding Donald Trump’s administration accountable on a nightly basis. The channel, however, has seen its ratings decline over the past year in average total primetime viewers (down 41%) and the key age 25-54 demo (down 54%), while it has expanded its reach on YouTube and TikTok.
While the programming in front of the camera will remain consistent, there have been changes behind the scenes, which the anchors insist are for the better. For instance, Hayes said there’s now a Slack channel “populated by our reporters” that he can directly coordinate with when covering a big story. That’s a marked departure from the more detached relationship with the NBC reporting staff.
“The NBC newsroom was great and we used it, obviously, enormously,” said Hayes, but it was largely in the service of broadcast programs like “Nightly News” and “Today.” “It’s a very exciting new chapter in that respect.”
Ruhle, too, stressed the advantage of having a dedicated MSNBC (soon-to-be MS NOW) newsroom to jump on breaking stories and team up with hosts in a way that was more difficult in the past. “I have a lot of sourcing. I have the ability to get a lot of stories started,” she said. “I need a partner that we’re going to take this thing through.”
A big night for soon-to-be MS NOW
But before the anchors are fully out the door, there’s an election to cover. The most closely watched races are in New York, with 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani on track to win the city’s mayoral election, along with battles for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, sure to be seen as bellwethers for the nation ahead of next year’s midterms. There’s also a vote on Proposition 50, a California ballot measure to redistrict to the Democrats’ advantage in light of Texas changing its map to add Republican House seats.
The night serves as a way to illustrate to audiences that the soon-to-be newly named MS NOW will operate like it always has.
“I think it’s important to distinguish between narratives and data. These elections are important because they’re the first big voter data we’re getting,” said Hayes.
“It is important not to over-read it into the national political environment,” he said, adding that there are different regional issues in state races and candidate quality can play a decisive role, regardless of views on parties nationally. “You try to contextualize and try to see — being sort of curious and rigorous — what you can glean from what the voters are saying,” he said.
“To me the most exciting thing, at least here in New York, is voter turnout,” said Ruhle. Amid politicians and pundits spinning, she said, “data is everything.”
“What voters actually do matters,” she continued. “When you see scores of people come out and exercise their right to vote, that’s patriotism. That’s America. That’s democracy.”
On Mamdani’s rise
Speaking of New York, I asked Hayes, who wrote a book last year on attention, and how it plays into politics, about Mamdani as a media phenomenon. He said Mamdani has qualities as a politician that could work in any media age: “He’s charismatic, and he’s good at talking, and he’s persuasive, and he seems relatable and authentic.” But Hayes said that Mamdani certainly “has a feel for this moment in the attention economy” and essentially “posted himself into contention.”
“He was nowhere, and the stuff they started putting up online found an audience, started to take off, and that [sort] of propelled him,” Hayes said.
“If I closed my eyes,” added Ruhle, “and I hear all those words without the candidate’s name, I think you can insert Trump.”
“In some ways it’s the first time we’ve seen since Trump, someone on the other side, seem to have that same kind of intuitive knack for the specific contours of attention in the moment,” Hayes said. Mamdani had this “go-everywhere, talk-to-everyone attitude that has really paid off for him.”
Ruhle recalled Trump’s run in 2015 to 2016, a period when he regularly called into TV news shows and spoke with many journalists.
Trump and Mamdani’s politics are “wildly different,” Hayes noted, but there are similarities in how they bucked the Republican and Democratic party establishments, respectively, in rising politically.
Covering Trump in 2025, however, is different from a decade back, as his administration pressures the news media in new ways.
Hayes suggested the way the Trump administration learned from the model of strongman leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “is pretty striking and unnerving, particularly when you look at the Paramount deal and the TikTok deal.” (Skydance’s David Ellison took control of Paramount, while Oracle, the company co-founded by his father, Trump supporter Larry Ellison, is among the investors buying TikTok.)
“It’s just all happening out in the open, and they want to roll up and consolidate as much of the tentpoles of media as they can under control of what they view as sympathetic allies, and I think there’s incredible peril in that,” Hayes said. “But I also think it makes what we’re doing more important than it’s ever been.”
As for CBS News, where David Ellison last month appointed Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, Ruhle said “they’re going to do what they’re going to do. We can’t control it. That’s why what we do, and doing it accurately, to me, has never been more important.”
Ruhle expressed joy in covering election night with Hayes, who she has a running gag with over his erudite vocabulary. “Every single time we have special coverage, Chris Hayes uses at least one word on television that I have never heard or did not know the definition of,” she said.
“She writes it down and she holds it up at me,” Hayes said, adding, “It’s a whole bit.”
Yes, the mission inside MSNBC, along with the inside jokes, should endure a few-blocks move in Manhattan.
