Inside MS NOW’s Post-Election Plans

A year ago, MS NOW didn’t even exist yet. The news brand flipped its switch from MSNBC to its new name on Nov. 15. But it was more than just a rebrand.

Where MSNBC relied on NBC News for its reporting and production, the Versant spinoff necessitated creating an entirely new newsroom, an entire D.C. bureau, a digital operation, and all the other things that go into running a modern media company.

Along the way it covered those midterm election campaigns, a blockbuster election night, launched a membership program, cut podcast and programming deals, and navigated a news cycle that never let up.

The Hollywood Reporter gathered many of MS NOW’s top executives: Scott Matthews, senior VP of newsgathering; Madeleine Haeringer, senior VP of digital, Marcus Mabry, senior VP of content strategy, and Washington D.C. bureau chief Sudeep Reddy to check in on what they learned from those elections, and what comes next.

What were the biggest learnings from the election, and what are the kind of things you’re going to take from that as you begin to look ahead to what comes next?

Marcus Mabry: I’ve been in our business for a very long time, 30 years or so. To me, I feel like we were made for this moment, and this moment was made for us more than any of our competitors. The fact is that in this historic moment, we would not have been able to do what we did — including the news gathering team or the digital team — if we had not spun [off from NBCUniversal]. The fact that this brand has this promise of authenticity, and not commodity journalism, meant we could actually address the historical moment with the kind of passion and importance that really got to what it meant to the audience. And you know, as the membership guy, to our members, to our community, we could speak to it in a way that I don’t think anyone else could, and we would not have been able to do that if we had still been a part of NBC, that’s my feeling.

Scott Matthews: I don’t disagree, it’s probably a little bit more mechanical than philosophical, but for us in newsgathering, when we pushed off the docks about a year ago, every move we made and every experience that we’ve had was aimed towards the midterm elections. We just knew that was going to be a bit of a yardstick for us internally and probably externally as well.

So I think the biggest takeaway for me, at least, from this experience has been we’re on the right track as far as the way we imagined and developed the newsroom, newsroom systems, the people we hired, it was a stress test to get here because you’re kind of building the car as you’re driving it, and then you have this just enormous moment. And I would say, not only did we not have any major issues, I don’t think we had any minor ones either. Sure there are things that when you post mortem nip and tuck here and there with some learnings, but I think overall it just sort of verified for us that everything we’ve been building for the last year is probably the right way to do it.

Madeleine Haeringer: This is what I came to MS to try to accomplish and to build, and while it’s only been a year in and we’re just starting out, I mean, on the digital side, there are so many things, but we didn’t have an elections landing page a year ago. We didn’t have a results page. We didn’t have polling pages. We didn’t have our own journalists live blogging for two days. To have these tools and to pull it together and to just have everybody pulling in that same direction with so much enthusiasm and excitement and people wanting to be part of it and wanting to contribute, and I think we had a record for the amount of people who contributed to a live blog.

Matthews: Yeah, we joked that a year ago I don’t think we even had 18 reporters, and the other night we had 18 people live on one night, so that was a bit of an interesting mile marker.

Mabry: And the audience really appreciated it. I mean, they told us in the metrics how much they appreciated it.

Sudeep Reddy: I would say watching it all come together is exhilarating in any newsroom. That’s part of what being a journalist is about. Where you could see all the work leading into Election Day. It was particularly resonant for us because we’re one of the rare organizations with an absolute clarity of focus in what we’re doing. We exist to cover democracy, we also exist in this current form as a startup in trying to think about how we are reaching audiences across the spectrum of demographics, of geographies, of getting them interested and excited in all of the pieces of democracy.

I did want to dig into that a little bit, the startup nature of it. To what extent did you feel like you had to do things just because that’s how things were done versus trying things that maybe were a little out of left field or a little riskier? And to what extent was that a factor as you were each taking advantage of the fact that you were not associated with NBC News anymore and you could do things maybe a little bit differently or a little scrappier?

Matthews: It was actually one of the reasons why this job was attractive to me was because you actually were starting from scratch and you didn’t have to stick by any old rules of the road or “we’ve always done it this way.”

Reddy: If you actually really take in what happened here, lots of people rightly thought it was absolutely nuts to do this spinoff when it was first announced. They thought, “What are they doing?” And long before I even considered joining, I did wonder, “Well, what is the goal here?” When I then actually had my first conversation with Scott about how this spinoff was going to work, it was all about building something new with intention, and I would say the spinoff was actually the best thing that could have ever happened to MSNBC because it allowed us to think about building something new as a startup, out of an existing platform that was incredibly influential already, unlike most media startups, we have an audience and substantial revenue to lay the foundation for all of the growth that we want to do into these new platforms.

Haeringer: And invest. I mean, Rebecca [Kutler], that she’s very willing to invest in all these platforms, and also — for me, it’s a little different. I was lucky to come in where there was no newsgathering operation or D.C. bureau — MSNBC had a robust digital presence. We were already an audio juggernaut. We already performed very well on YouTube with billions of downloads and have a highly trafficked website. It just got even bigger, more engagement because of these newsgathering operations contributing. And so you know, for midterms, we had the biggest day on YouTube ever, I think three out of the five biggest days last week, and so it just supercharged with the focus and the original reporting and everything coming to us.

Mabry: But I also think the talent that you guys have hired too, those new and existing talent, of course, the existing digital talent, they’re going to be into innovation and technology. I’ve never seen anywhere else I’ve worked before talent — be it linear talent, TV talent, reporting talent, including the anchor talent — I’ve never seen people so game to try innovation, to say “I want to be put in a new situation on a new platform in a new format.” That’s not normal in our business. That’s not typical in our business. And I’ve never encountered the kind of people who are up for it and game for it as I have here. And that’s hugely helpful when you’re trying to build a new business.

I was going to say, I think I’ve had conversations in the last year with both Joe Scarborough and Stephanie Ruhle, and each of them have proactively been like, “I went to them and I said listen, let’s do a newsletter. Let’s do an event.” You don’t see that often.

Mabry: I’ve never seen that where I worked before, and that’s huge. That helps us a lot.

But to what end? When you’re when you’re thinking about on the talent front, that’s I think one of the biggest assets you have, you have these people that are household names that are familiar that have fan bases.

Mabry: That are authentic.

They’re authentic to who they are. So when you think about how to deploy it, if Joe Scarborough wants to do a newsletter, or a podcast or whatever it might be, how do you decide where to deploy it? Does it go on YouTube? Is it something free like what Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle are doing on YouTube? Is it something you do in a membership situation where it’s an add on? It’s something that a hardcore fan would really want would enjoy and might pay for.

Mabry: We test and learn all the time, and so Madeleine and I have this discussion, this debate, this lovely congenial debate all the time about what goes in front of the paywall, what goes behind the membership wall, and we test and learn. So we’re doing it with lots of our podcasts, right now the Clock It podcast, very popular. Should that be a membership exclusive? Because they’re building a fan base. Yes, it’s great in front of the paywall. All the YouTube views are insane. There are some audiences that will never ever download, an app. As long as we can increase brand awareness with those folks and let them see it and know about us? That’s a great advantage. We do want to drive them down the funnel to actually bring them to subscription if they’re eligible to.

As you all look ahead, what are some of the things that you’ve learned over the past year or from the elections that you may want to tweak or change because the truth is, the ’28 election is still a couple years away, and the media business doesn’t stop.

Matthews: We are very collaborative. Actually, Marcus and I are talking about this today. We don’t have a lot, there’s no walls here when it comes to fiefdoms, but I do think we could probably do a better job still of taking advantage of our various platforms and being a bit more collaborative on the product. Making sure that we’re really thinking holistically about where we can put everything, where can newsgathering deploy resources we have. We’re going to launch obviously a bunch of embeds out in the field, and I think traditionally those folks are looked at as a bit of TV and a bit of print or digital. I think we just have to sort of figure out how are we going to be able to get to use all of the resources that we’re gathering out there and putting in the very best places to get the best result and feeding the audience what they need from us.

Mabry: We’ve tested and learned already with live Q and A’s for those reporters in the field on a regular basis. So every night at 6 p.m., we’ll have reporters in the field who come in to do live communities with our members, and they love that connection. We did a ton of research before we launched the membership community, and we found that one of the big pain points was people who felt isolated, and people wanted a greater connection to us. That they feel intimacy and get to ask the reporters questions that they don’t get to do on television when it’s a one-way relationship. We’ve started to build live events around reporters in the field, so we had a bunch of reporters on the road, and we did live events around them. There is a power to live, to actually being in person that we’re actually getting to tap into, and we’ll do a lot more of that going forward to ’28.

I do think that there is a hunger for people to touch grass, so to speak, to get out in the real world and see other folks. And the members’ lounge concept, holding more live events and town halls, and the access in the real world to reporters and anchors and hosts, how embraced is that in the organization? Was there any convincing involved here? Because look, I’ve talked to a lot of on-air television talent, and a lot of them are quite happy to just host their show and go home.

Mabry: I don’t know if you got to see our Together in Texas, where we took our annual Fan Fest to Dallas, and you know Steph Ruhle. Woo! I mean, she was having a good time. I think all of our talent was, but she was like literally running around that arena. We were in a stadium, that’s crazy for a news organization. But you talked about Joe and Steph and the enthusiasm they have, they’re up for all this stuff. Morning Joe has a Morning Joe family meeting live Q and A every Tuesday at noon. It was Joe who said I want to do this, and he came up with that name and he said I want to have our fans be on screen with me. That was from him.

Haeringer: And they enjoy the connection with the audience, with the viewers. They really are curious about what people think and questions because while some of our anchors get to do some reporting, a lot of them are anchoring shows, and we just did a members lounge in D.C. on Saturday after the election where people were doing primetime coverage till 2 o’clock in the morning and Jen Psaki, Simone Sanders, Eugene Daniels, Katie Tur, our White House reporters, one of whom, Akayla Gardner, was working that day, they all came by. This was not something that was live. It was not broadcast. It was supposed to be 20 minutes. You had to pull them away 40 minutes later, because they just really feed off of it, and very much enjoy the interaction, and they don’t want to be in some bubble behind a screen. They want to hear what is on the mind of the viewers, and it kind of feeds the energy, so there’s just an overwhelming enthusiasm to participate in these events and to to be out there.

It’s not uncommon after an election to rejigger the newsgathering operation a little bit, but you’re only one year in. You just built the newsgathering. Are you thinking about that at all? Do you need people now that can handle coverage of ground stops at LaGuardia in addition to the elections?

Matthews: Yeah, I think that’s true. But I will say, and I’m gonna have Sudeep really jump in on some of what we’re looking forward to on the ’28 plan. But I think one of the things that that’s made us successful is we realized very early what this channel, what the brand is about, what the shows are interested in, what our audiences are interested in, and we’ve really focused our newsgathering to those things. We decided very early on not to be a catch-all, to be a general news newsgathering operation. This is a place for politics. People are very interested in democracy and politics and elections and all of the things that go around that. So we’ve always been looking at it for the last year through the lens of that is our bread and butter. That is what we are going to focus 90 plus percent of our time on, knowing that from time to time there are going to be these outsized stories, major breaking news events that are going to sort of rise above the fold for a few minutes to interrupt that, and so we do have the ability to shift into that mode. Sometimes I joke, a Category Five hurricane is going to hit Miami. We get to put our rain slickers on and get wet for a few days, and then we go back to what our bread and butter is.

Reddy: Yeah. First, I think it’s clear the overwhelming focus of the next two years will be about the state of democracy and the future of democracy. The current state of democracy is going to come down to a lot of conversation about investigations, obviously, both chambers of Congress flipping will lead to just a huge amount of conversation about how we got to where we are. And you can pick the one issue that is bipartisan across the board. It is public concern about corruption, the grift in government, the number of people in official positions who are using and abusing their positions. That is a huge topic that everyone’s going to be interested in, and we are really going to position ourselves to shine a light on that and help the audience understand what’s actually happening and has been happening, not just in the last two years but I think even beyond that.

The other is going to be the future, meaning the 2028 election, and I would say this is probably going to be the most wide-open primary since 2004. If you trace back every single one of the general elections since then, there was always somebody who was an obvious front runner in each of those races. And now we’re preparing for a couple of dozen candidates to be running on the Democratic side, probably after the election, a lot more Republicans running as well than we would have anticipated, and we are going to really focus on what those two races mean for the future of the country.

Just to hit on something you mentioned, I get that MS NOW’s audience is particularly interested in politics and policy, but how do you react to respond if there is a lull? Not that the investigations are going to stop, but if there is a certain percentage of the audience out there that’s like “maybe I’ll take a three month break from politics for a little bit.” As a brand that is so focused on politics and policy, how do you react to that?

Mabry: You want to build the use case that’s broader. Our bread and butter is politics, the audience can always come to us for political news. I think that’s a great place to be. It’s a backbone. It remains the backbone forever. At the same time, and we really get to do this in the DTC space because we have this membership that’s a rabid fan base. So we get to test out a whole bunch of news-adjacent verticals that are not in our bread and butter, and then we get to see how does this audience respond to it? That may be the medical stuff we’re doing, the relationship stuff we’re doing, the Dan Harris meditation stuff we’re doing, that’s all test and learn. And so we get to see, how does the audience respond to that? Claire McCaskill, we have a bunch of DTC exclusives. Claire McCaskill’s Political Potluck, the audience are rabid fans of that. Andrew Weissman and his political show, rabid fans of that. You get to see Claire talking to people like Pete Buttigieg, and get kind of a different aspect, a different side of those political people that you don’t get otherwise.

On the podcast front, like I feel like the worlds of podcasts and TV are colliding in a lot of ways.

Haeringer: Well, more and more people are listening to podcasts on YouTube, which isn’t TV, but visual. We shall see. We’re doubling, tripling down on politics on digital, and I just feel across MS NOW that this historic election, the voters who went out and demanded change are now going to be demanding results with a new party in charge, and I think that is just going to be top of mind. I just don’t see our audience walking away from politics anytime soon. How are they going to make my lives better? And they’re just feeding into it. We have, to your point earlier sort of gone after our audience on every platform because they exist in a lot of places. So The Best People with Nicolle Wallace, which is an audio podcast, is also on YouTube. You can watch it on the weekends in linear, and we have found a very robust audience on all of those platforms. And so we’ll continue to give our audience that access in all the different places. And I think we’re just going to continue to to do more, and when we have more embeds and more campaign reporters, we’ll be able to do more politically focused podcasts and video shows and live streams.

Mabry: It’s a good point because even as there’s a secular decline, we’re actually in more households with more audience than we ever had before. So that is an interesting kind of counter wave to the rest of the industry that we actually are in more places than we were 10 years ago.

Matthews: I think the relationship that we built with the audience makes it easier for us to figure out what they are interested at the moment, and then you know adjust accordingly to the things that they care about.

Mabry: And we’ve got this whole membership community now where they’re telling us on not just a daily basis, but I guess second by second, what they are passionate about, what they want to know about, and how it affects their lives, especially how the politics affect their lives.

Haeringer: Holding institutions accountable regardless of who is in charge, Republicans or Democrats is just very, I think we’ll see. I think people in general have a lot less patience with folks they agree with than ones they disagree with, and we just have found our audience already. Nicolle and Rachel [Maddow] did a recording of The Best People in Boston last night, live, and I mean, the audience is sort of a left-leaning audience, they were very excited about the results, but they are already sort of asking “what are the Dems gonna do? What is the plan? What laws are gonna be passed? Is it gonna be one big bill?” And they were already kind of on to the next thing, and so it’s like, all right, we’ve got to continue to put our resources into this new Congress, this race for the White House. What’s going to be happening on the judicial front, which our audience is very interested in, and so I just feel that we’re going to roll right into that.

Mabry: I think that’s a strength, though. As Scott’s said, we know who we are and what we do, and so we start from that, right? And so from that foundation, we can then grow from that foundation. But that foundation, we haven’t exhausted it all yet. What they want from us and the core offering, and that’s great.

Matthews: I think until we get through the next election, I can’t imagine that we’re going to have any sort of let up in interest.