Can MS survive without NBC? Inside CEO Mark Lazarus’ efforts to save cable’s great brands

25:51And what would it mean? All politics are local, right? What does it mean for me? And then, you know, you get to that pretty quickly when you're thinking about big changes, right? Right. And then, so we had one meeting and then in the second meeting, talking about the opportunity that the cashflow, how much cashflow there would be, the theory that whoever does this, there would be opportunity to reinvest and it would be run your own show, build a culture. My mindset just kind of went quickly. Hmm. What if I did that side of it? So I started thinking about it from, from the spin side, as opposed to the remain co side.

26:27And I think the way I was talking in the room probably spurred Brian to think Mark might be interested in this. And I think, you know, he would want someone that he knows and trusts to be part of it. So shortly after that, he and I had, and Kavanaugh had a conversation about, would I want to go do this? I said, give me a little bit of time to think about it, like a long weekend. I spent a long weekend thinking about it, discussing it with my with my wife just based on what I knew it would take in terms of energy and time to get it off the ground, make it successful and investment of years. And then I came back and said, I'm in.

27:14I'm really excited about the opportunity to be able to be creative and transformational and build out a company and a culture that I believe in and can be proud of and that I would like to be a legacy for both me and Brian and all of the people who had the courage to come do this with us.

27:35Ben Smith:NBC is one of the last media companies that has a real robust internal culture. You know, lots of executives like you have had very, very successful careers at a high level on the inside. Being a public company CEO, like a totally different thing, a pretty like savage environment where a couple bad quarters and you're out, there's no safety net, it's much more public. I mean, are you losing any sleep over this? I don't sleep much either way, but yeah, sure, that's nerve-wracking. It's a big swing. And I think part of the excitement for me, I've been able in my career, I've been fortunate to be, in most ways, very nicely treated in public settings because I've been representing big, big fun events and big businesses.

28:22Yeah. This is something I've never done before. It's a challenge. You know, I've been kind of in the same pocket of media for, as I said, nearly 40 years. This gives me, you know, a real challenge and could be a really interesting way to finish my career over the next however many, three, six, ten years, whatever, however long they want to keep me around, as you say, until they come looking for my scalp.

28:51Ben Smith:No more. Just ask the Olympics guy the fun questions. Yeah, that's right. What are you going to do? The hard questions then were what's going to happen if the Chechenian rebels come over the mountains into Sochi. Is that something that you were really, you guys had a real meeting about something like that? We absolutely did. All that contingency, safety, security planning was real. We were tied into every major U.S. and international law enforcement agencies and worked closely with them. That's unbelievable. Wow, that's crazy. That doesn't necessarily prepare you for U.S. politics, but it was real.

29:31And in my previous experience with news, I had some experience like that. But I think the point is this is a really big, interesting challenge for me personally. And again, I am excited by that challenge. So one of the things that I'm kind of curious about to the point, you know, you've mentioned about MSNBC, it has this kind of robust, progressive audience. How are you thinking about navigating this company that now has, you know, previously MSNBC was a part of NBC, you know, among a fan of many different companies. Now it is one of the key brands. It's the first one that's often mentioned when people are writing about Versant.

30:09And in some ways, that obviously presents an opportunity because you have this really strong, loyal audience and the strong brand. But on the other hand, it also kind of puts a little bit of a target on your back. People know that you guys are strongly associated with this left of center, progressive brand. At a moment when the Trump administration is really kind of going after, in some cases, aggressively, and federal regulators are going after aggressively companies that are perceived to be kind of leaning to the left in any sort of public way. How are you thinking about that and having that brand be so kind of central to Bursant?

30:42First, I think more holistically about the portfolio, right? I mean, yes, that brand is known for that audience and who it serves. But CNBC is a centrist, pro-business, reaches a very different audience and maybe serves even people on the other side of the political spectrum a little more soundly. you know nascar where we're very involved all of our sports properties with with usa and golf channel certainly we have businesses that reach all political spectrums yes we happen to have one and that does make us uh it's it's a big one and it's an important one so it does put us in a spotlight i think the most important thing we can do is try to get as many people on both sides of the aisle to watch us, to be honest and accurate and factual with our reporting, to not speculate when we don't know all the facts, and to try to make sure that we have a tone that says, even if you don't agree with us, you should watch us because we have a point of view that's worth hearing that would be my cry to our team and what i hope people will see where we're trying to do but so i yes it's that is certainly you know a challenge for us as it is a challenge for others in the space we happen to to be a a big voice when you're the number two cable network in all of television, you know, behind Fox, you have a voice that people are hearing.

32:29And if they don't like it, they may want to lash out at us. Was that kind of part of the calculus a week or so ago, you guys made a very swift decision to fire an MSNBC analyst who had said some comments right after Charlie Kirk was shot, kind of talking a little bit about his rhetoric and whatnot. You guys came out very, very swiftly and said, this is not what we want to kind of have on our air. Were you kind of trying to send a message with that decision? Because I mean, to some people, they thought it was, you know, it was very swift. It wasn't like he was suspended or anything like that. Yeah, listen, we have core values for this new organization.

33:08And we think the actions we took were, you know, us committing to those and making, you know, public our commitment to those core values. We're not going to change who our brand is. We're not going to, I mean, what our brand stands for, obviously. We're changing our brand name, but we're not going to change that. We're not going to change our editorial approach fully, but we want to be respectful and make sure that there's open and honest dialogue, not speculation, not contrived or speech that's going to cause more divisiveness, you know, I think we have an opportunity to lead the way towards this respectful conversation while remaining this progressive voice.

33:52Ben Smith:Do you worry that the real message you said is just like, if you make enough noise, yell at us loudly enough, we will panic and fire somebody that very day? I mean, why not wait a week? Why not wait a month? It just seems like the lesson of the last 10 years is that companies are getting sort of jammed up on social media and reacting so fast. And that if you can just pause a beat that you can kind of make a more rational decision this this was clear we had very thorough conversations over those you know however many half dozen hours or so uh and i this was for us a a clear line and i think if you look at the history of people saying things on on our networks uh you know there's there's been lots of lots of potential times and issues.

34:37And this one was just more clear to us. You know, Rebecca, who's a very strong editorial leader, and we, she and I, and we had discussions and she sent out a note and was very clear with it. And we went from there. And when you say Rebecca, you're talking about Rebecca Cutler. She's the president of MSNBC.

34:58Ben Smith:Do you think more broadly, you know, one of the kind of core Trump administration move has been to go after leverage, sort of sometimes unexpected levering points to these huge conglomerated media companies. You know, like nobody was really thinking about like the Nextar Tegna acquisition in terms of like, what is late night going to say? But that suddenly becomes the FCC is able to use that as leverage. You are specifically out of the linear TV business. Does that mean you can just tell Brendan Carr to screw up? No, we would never do that. I mean, he's part of the government apparatus. I've not met him yet.

35:32I look forward to that. Does he regulate you in any way? No, the FCC is not part of our regulation. That must be nice. Well, I mean, sure, the fewer places that regulate you in general, I think, is better and gives us a freedom. You know, I will say this, and I'm not advocating for any side here, but I can tell you from personal experience that there are affiliates that don't like certain things that happen on the networks that they carry and they have always voiced them privately, at least in my experience, and said, we didn't like that. That doesn't, you know, my audience, my markets don't like this.

36:12And it goes on both sides of the aisle. But they've always voiced that privately. This obviously became a more public example of that. But it's not new that affiliates take issue with what the national broadcasters at times, and it's not often, but it does happen with what is being put out over the airwaves.

36:33Ben Smith:Do you think that in this political environment, like these conglomerates are too big? I mean, there was obviously a big logic to pushing all these companies together. You're now in this unbundling phase. And I wonder if you think smaller, more nimble media companies, that might mean ultimately also then spinning out CNBC, spinning out MS, whatever. Like, Are we seeing a trend toward a kind of deconglut, whatever that is, unbundling, I guess? You know, we might be the first step in that. I do believe that we will be able to move faster, swifter, with less bureaucracy in our new environment. And I think that was, again, that's one of the things that was attractive to me.

37:14I mean, listen, I was part of the big NBC Comcast machine. It was the best 15 years of my career. I owe them a lot. I'm very appreciative, and I will always be a fan and will be partners where it makes sense. But I'm looking forward to the opportunity to work in this different environment at maybe a different pace without having so many different voices that are important in that world.

37:44Ben Smith:Yeah, I guess you're about to do some rebundling, too. So maybe it's not such a simple story. Yeah, it's not. You know, and, you know, us separating our news gathering with NBC News is a complicated project. You know, we're building, we're hiring, we're taking some, we have some of them, their folks are coming with us, some are not, but we believe that we're going to build this world-class news organization, both here that will serve our audiences and the needs that we have. We'll have partnerships with others, with third parties, to make sure we're covered everywhere. We will also have an international partner in Sky, who will be our eyes and ears around the world, and we will be able to partner with them.

38:31And they'll provide us great service. And we've known them for years because we've been part of the same company, but we'll have a commercial deal with them to be our international news gathering service. So Warner Brothers Discovery essentially is copying you guys. they decided that they're going to spin off some of their cable assets as well. Do you guys feel that you are a better position than Warner's in this regard? You know, I won't speak to better position. We believe that our heavy news sports and live event portfolio gives us the ability to work with distributors and advertisers in a way that a broader portfolio may not.

39:11We have great entertainment properties with real fans, too, like Oxygen. True crime is a huge genre that has real fan bases to it, and E with its live stuff. And then USA, which is a mix of entertainment and sports, so I kind of lumped that into one and has been a top five network for the last 30 years or so. So yeah, we think we're very well positioned. They have a different set of assets than we do, right? They have many more entertainment assets. They have some good sports properties, strong sports properties. They're more heavily international than we are. We have very little international, really save CNBC.

39:50So it's a different asset pool. And I'm sure they would think they're better positioned than we are, or maybe they won't talk that way. I'm sure they're positioned. I want us all to be strong. The stronger the ecosystem of keeping pay TV going as long as we can, and partnerships with the MVPDs and now the VMVPDs and YouTube TV, those are important relationships. And there's a lot of customers, as we said, 65 million of them, who still receive their video that way and are counting on us to stay strong. We started this by asking what Versant is, and I'm really curious, when you look back in 10 years, how do you hope that people describe Versant?

40:32that we built a diversified media company that serves deeply vertical audiences. And it may be, you know, we're starting with these four, but there's no reason we won't be adding to that. And there are other vertical businesses that have real strength and depth that you can build other businesses around. You know, food is an example. Homes are an example. So I think that there's opportunity that we build a next generation company centered around media, but not explicitly only media. It can be in transactional and serving consumers who are in deep, deep markets with lots of audience opportunity.

41:18And by audience, I mean, not just viewers, but transaction.

41:20Ben Smith:One quick follow on that, you know, my colleague Liz Hoffman wrote earlier about your strong balance sheet and the extent to which you're, I mean, you're sort of in a fund position in that regard, in that you really can do a lot of acquisitions. And just, it sounds like you're spending a lot of time thinking about acquisitions. Like, what share of your brain is M &A right now? Yeah, I would say we're doing three things simultaneously right now. We're still separating, which is taking up a fair amount of bandwidth because it's complicated everything from where are we going to be physically located in all the various cities?

41:51Because we've actually moved out of 30 Rock now. We're over in a place you guys might be familiar with, the old New York Times building on 43rd Street. so that's our temporary headquarters that we call summer camp and summer camp because it's you know it's a place you go for a while and then you go then you go home so eventually and then we'll move to a permanent so that you know those and then the technical separation of making sure our signals get where they're supposed to go where they're going to emanate from and NBC's got to do the same thing because we have to move we were all in one place and now we're separating where we transmit from to starting benefits plans and 401k plans and everything that you need to do to start a new public company.

42:34So the separation takes up a lot of bandwidth. And then we're operating the businesses as they exist today. And then the third leg of that is growth. And inside of that growth is M &A, both organic and inorganic. I would say for me personally, I'm spending a little less time on the separation than many of the others are and spending most of my time on operating and growth. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Mark.

43:01Ben Smith:This was fun. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys hearing our story and look forward to follow up. And a few years from now, I'll come back and report. Yes, we'll have to do a check-in. Yeah, please, as often as you like.

43:29what's your kind of first take here what did you think about uh what mark had to say was there

43:33Ben Smith:anything in there that really surprised you um you know a couple of things i mean i i actually i love that you sort of introduced him as the golf guy and the extent to which this is really a guy who spent his career on the olympics the big part of the biggest one of the biggest events in media and really a sports business and i think the extent to which he is looking to turn all these businesses into businesses like the greatest business in the world, which is the Golf Channel, is kind of just obviously not the way, you know, I spent most of my time thinking. And I thought it was really interesting.

44:00Ben Smith:Like, tea time? Like, who knew? Not my world. And I mean, again, I don't really know what the tea time is of MSNBC. CNBC, the tea time is obviously something involving, you know, trading or analysis or something closer to retail trading. It's interesting and ambitious of him. And I thought that breakdown he gave of revenue that they imagined it's going to be a third subscription in their various forms, a third advertising, and a third, like, all this other weird stuff is going to be really hard to build and really interesting. And then the second thing was just how directly and clearly that he is planning to roll up a huge chunk of, in MSNBC's case, the progressive media ecosystem.

44:40Ben Smith:I mean, I didn't expect him to be quite that direct and being like, yep, the Pod Save guys, the Bulwark guys, you see us on our air. Right. They're on our TV all day. Exactly. And you want to know who they're going to acquire? Watch their TV. That was pretty interesting. Right. I totally agree. But I also did think that it was really interesting and probably, I mean, probably no accident that he mentioned Tea Time pretty quickly. Because as a media reporter, as someone who watches this - Are you a golfer, Max? this? I'm not a golfer. I like golf. My dad taught me a little bit when I was growing up.

45:15I don't play very often, but whenever I've gone to the driving range and whatnot, I realize I've actually still kind of got it. So that feels nice. But it did kind of get the imagination juices kind of flowing. I thought, oh, that's really interesting. That's a small part of the business that I didn't realize that they had. What are some other kind of complementary things that you could imagine other parts of their company could get into. I thought Tea Time was a really, really interesting kind of example.

45:42Ben Smith:The other thing that I think should give people who work at that company a lot of comfort is that Brian Roberts is planning to hang on to that third of the company indefinitely. Because I think in the public markets, there's just immediately a ton of pressure to say, like, all right, enough with trying to reinvent whatever thing is going to be the Tea Time of NBC. Let's just lay off half the staff and take the cash. And I think that they will at least for a while be insulated from that kind of pressure by their most important shareholder is actually – I think that's news and that's really interesting and important to that company's future.

46:19Yeah.

46:19Ben Smith:I mean, what did you make of his answers to the questions about Trump, about Kimmel, basically, about that whole situation that he's now navigating? It was interesting. I thought that he – well, first of all, he was very clear. He wanted to make very clear, of course, that MSNBC was, while it's often mentioned as the first of the – when people mention Versant and talk about it and describe it, they're often mentioning MSNBC as the first company in that portfolio. He was very careful to immediately clarify that it's one of 11 companies. They're the NASCAR company, really. Yes, exactly. No, but he rightly also, of course, brought up the fact that they have a channel that is watched by a lot of conservatives and right-wingers.

47:01I mean, we saw that when we were both in attendance at the Squawk 30th anniversary party and were walking around next to Wilbur Ross and Peter Devaro and other folks like that. So obviously there is some kind of truth to it. But I also thought that it was really interesting how almost like free and liberated he felt to push back maybe against certain voices that he felt were not aligned with where the company wants to go. And actually, I do think you have seen that at MSNBC. They have kind of distanced themselves from some of the more controversial voices on the network, and they've really stayed closely with Rachel Maddow, Morning Joe, Nicole Wallace, some of those folks.

47:40Not to say that any of those folks don't garner controversy.

47:42Ben Smith:They certainly do. Do you mean that they're going to sort of avoid a more strident left-wing pastor and stick with a kind of more establishment left? Absolutely. I think that, I just think that, like, they've, I mean, if you think about it, they got rid of Joy Reid. They immediately cut ties with this guy, Matthew Dowd. Mehdi Hassan. Yes, they got rid of Mehdi quite a while ago. Mehdi had been very outspoken on the war in Gaza. And so I think that they have tried to stake out very deliberately this position on the center left, but they do not want to be at the kind of – while he described it as progressive, I would say that they're not at the left flank of that party, and that feels intentional.

48:21Ben Smith:And that is partly because they are largely an advertising business and advertisers are very sensitive to that kind of positioning. You wrote a great piece in Semaphore this week about the extent to which independent left-wing media is benefiting from this sense that the corporate media has rolled over for Trump. Where do you position this new MS, which is, by the way, going to try to buy some of these independent companies in that? Like, where will they be able to recapture that energy or the drop site news of the world where, you know, wherever the AOCs and Zoran Mamdani's kind of find their media allies?

48:53Ben Smith:Like, is that going to be where the energy is? It's really interesting because part of the appeal for all of these independent media folks is the fact that they don't have a boss and they're not going to get fired and pulled from the air for saying something. controversial. And I actually think that one of the reasons why you haven't seen that much rolling up of independent media companies as much as maybe certain people thought at the beginning of the year is that a lot of people who are independent and who are making money and who are attractive to these companies really do value their independence, right?

49:24Like that's not a small part of the equation. Being able to be your own boss, not be fired, and being only responsible and only kind of having to answer to your own audience, I think, is really important. So I personally think it might be a little bit more of a struggle or not quite as easy as some people might assume. That is unless the paycheck is, you know, pretty big.

49:47Ben Smith:Yeah, or they may bring these people in and then find that they're losing at least some of the audience that likes them for their independence. That is going to be a really complicated balance. And he sort of referred to that, that is there a way to bring them in in a way that doesn't homogenize, I think was the word he used. Yeah, and I mean, that's obviously something that a lot of companies are trying to do, right? Like the New York Times has been trying to do that. Fox, right. Fox Corp, which, you know, TBD on if whether any of the personalities from Red Seat Ventures decide to leave, you know, aren't happy being in-house at Fox Corp, you know.

50:17And of course, we saw that a little bit with the New York Times with Pablo Torre, you know, this dance around his reporting is not technically subject to their standards, but they are putting him in their feed. And it can be a little bit messy at times, but it'll be really interesting to see how Mark navigates it.

50:36Ben Smith:Yeah, it's going to be a great story. And Mark was just fascinating and open. And thanks for shepherding him onto RAR. That was a great conversation. Yes, 40 or 50 or 60 emails, many calls later, we finally got him. We appreciate you, Holly and Keith, as well. Yeah, and Sheena, our producer, for going back and forth with the... A lot of emails. A lot of emails. But thanks, Ben. I thought it was great. Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from Semaphore. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki with special thanks to Josh Billinson, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kaur.

51:15Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is Brian Roberts, who's still holding on to a little bit of verse. Brian, tell us what you think. And, you know, you're also invited onto the show. Your name has been invoked. You must respond. Come on, McSignals.

51:34Ben Smith:And if you like McSignals, whether or not you're Brian Roberts, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching on YouTube, please like and subscribe. And if you still want more, you can always sign up for SimaFour's media newsletter out every Sunday night.

51:52Thank you.