MS NOW Wants to Turn Its Viewers Into a Fandom

0:00I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes, and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com.

0:37Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.

0:46From Wired, this is The Big Interview, where we'll get to know the people beyond the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power, and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. My guest today is Rebecca Cutler. She's the president of cable news channel MSNOW, formerly known as MSNBC. It was Rebecca who oversaw that rebrand late last year, which, in spite of early polling suggesting otherwise, has been a massive success. Since that rebrand, MSNOW has experienced continuous double-digit audience growth. No small feat these days for TV news. And this month, they're launching their inaugural direct-to-consumer offering, the MSNOW membership.

1:26Rebecca got her start as a production assistant at CNN more than 20 years ago, working her way up through the ranks and eventually winning an Emmy Award, two Peabody Awards, and two DuPont Columbia Awards. No big deal.

1:44Rebecca, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. And I have to start by just saying I was part of teams for all of that work. I always feel like— That's a very good leadership thing of you to do. The thing about television and why I've wanted to build my career there and loved it so much is it is literally the definition of a team sport. There is no thing that you can do in TV on your own. I don't care how brilliant or great you are. If you don't have your 20 to 30 to 40 closest friends helping you, it's not going to make it on TV. And when did you join MSNBC? Get me the timeline. Yeah, let me remember the timeline.

2:26I think it was around it was right before the midterms in 2022. OK, so I had grown up at CNN. I spent more than 20 years there. I left earlier in 2022 and some folks that I knew and really respected reached out from then MSNBC. And they talked about one of those jobs that kind of has a lot of running room. And it's kind of like a little ambiguous, but in the best way. And I thought, yeah, let's check it out. I started at MS, then NBC, running their digital businesses, basically all their nonlinear businesses. And it gave me a real opportunity to learn the building and learn the place, but also think about what are the missed opportunities that we could take advantage of in the next few years.

3:17And at some point in your tenure, you took on the whole thing. Yes. And what did you feel like, because this is driving towards this subscription offering that you're launching, what were those big opportunities, those big challenges that you identified when you looked at the whole portfolio and thought to yourself like, what are we going to do here? What were you trying to solve for? So one of the things that immediately struck me when I came over was the fandom. So I had worked in other newsrooms. I have friends who work in other newsrooms. I always I love the news and love what we do. But I had never worked at a place where the audience really sees themselves as fans and fans of and a deep, deep connection to talent.

4:09So it's the kind of thing, it was immediately clear to me when I joined MS, it was also at the same time Jen Psaki joined. And we had known each other a little from a previous life. So we went out into the field together and just did a few kind of pretty straightforward kind of field reporting pieces. And I've walked through the airports over my career with a lot of different anchors and news types of people. I've never had the experience of walking through with Jen just the and that's why she was a great fit for MS. She was someone that you could see people were behind and and in and were rooting for and had a deeper connection with.

4:57And I think when you think about Rachel Maddow and how she lands and how when a book, I mean, if you talk to, you're very close to this industry, if you talk to anyone in publishing and ask them where they would ideally like to debut their book, I think most of them would say The Rachel Maddow Show. And there's a reason for that. the audience loyalty and engagement with Rachel has been proven over decades. It's funny, when she shares a Wired story on social media, the traffic to that story and the engagement on her social around Wired is crazy. I can tell you firsthand, looking at the analytics, like you can feel it, you can see it.

5:44It's remarkable. And I want to ask you more about talent in a minute, but that brings me to a great place to mention this membership program that you're launching. So I'm going to read from the press release, which I very rarely do, but you will offer, quote, new opportunities for members to interact directly with the brand's trusted journalists, exclusive community features to engage with each other, a new roster of contributors and experts, original creator content, new verticals that explore how news and politics impacts everyday life, and 24-7 access to live streams and linear programming.

6:15So you guys have been busy. But in layman's terms, if someone's listening to this or watching this and they're an MSNOW viewer, they watch it on TV sometimes, they see it on social, what should they expect from this? What are they getting that they're not already getting by, you know, having cable TV? Yeah. So I want to answer your question directly, but I just don't want to assume your audience is the MSNOW audience. So if you'll allow me 30 seconds. Give us your best pitch. I want to just step back and reintroduce MSNOW. MS Now. So as you mentioned in the intro, we launched as a brand, a new brand, around 18 months ago.

6:51And people traditionally see us as this cable channel. And that's great. We have a huge cable audience. We're actually right now the number two most watched channel in all of cable. Not all of cable news, all of cable. So that's ahead of ESPN, HGTV, TBS, TNT. Who's number one? Fox. I see. Okay. We might talk more about that later. And then, but that's just one piece of our business. We have right now a digital business before we even launch what we're launching this week that has more uniques than places like Axios and Politico, The Atlantic. People spend more time with us digitally than places like The Washington Post and NPR.

7:35And then on YouTube, we have been quite efficient at building out our presence in that space. So we have more clicks on YouTube than ABC News, NBC News and CBS News combined. So I say all of that to say we are starting from a position of strength. And then I'll come back to answer your question. What we are excited about and why we're launching this product is all those digital things I just mentioned. We don't have a way to catch all those people if they're not going to be watching cable. So the purpose of this membership is twofold. It's one, taking our current super fans that watch us on Linear and giving them more.

8:19So what are they going to get? They're going to get direct access to our talent. Seven days a week at noon and at 6 p.m., if you are a member of the MS Now community, you can hop on and directly interact with one of our anchors or one of our reporters. On Monday, it's going to be Rachel Maddow. And then you go through the week. You're going to hear from Michael Steele. You're going to hear from Jen Psaki. You're going to hear from Rev, Reverend Al Sharpton. You're going to hear from the people that you know and love from watching them on MSNOW and have the opportunity to ask them your question directly and not just interact with our talent, but also interact with each other.

8:59So when we started this process around a year and a half ago, we didn't just kind of sit in a conference room and think, hmm, let's make like another commodity news app. Because let's be honest, a lot of that already exists. What we did was actually start from a place of product research. So we went out to 18 ,000 people. We did surveys. We did in-person interviews. And we have spent the last year and a half taking that research and getting to where we are this week. And where we are this week is just the beginning. What I most want people to know is what you see this week will look vastly different six months from now and a year from now if we're doing our jobs right.

9:52What we need to do is build and learn and test and add investment and expand where we need to, but not really think that we're going to get it all right on day one, but give ourselves that latitude. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

10:14AI is everywhere in the workplace, but which companies are really making it work? That's the question at the heart of Rewired, McKinsey's playbook for winning with technology and AI. When you think about it from a company or a CEO perspective, it's actually not any harder than it is when you've done any transformation in the past, right? You got to go and understand what's the opportunity? How much is it worth? What's the investment required to get there? Is it going to be important for me to transform my business in that regard? But a lot of people don't actually go through that process of then understanding what are those two or three areas.

10:50And then making the hard call. Sometimes it's actually more difficult to say we're not doing four through six than it is to say we are doing one through three. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.

11:13I'm curious about the imperative here, maybe, if that's the right word. Is the goal to pull linear viewers onto digital, or is it to better engage the digital audience, or both? It's both. So all those people consuming us on YouTube, on digital, on social, in audio, we have done some research. 90 % of those people do not regularly consume us on linear television. So a big function of this product is to say, hey, you're watching YouTube videos all the time of Lawrence O'Donnell. Maybe you're not someone who's going to be a cable subscriber. Okay. But can you come join our community in another capacity?

12:02Can we create a product that entices you to be part of an MS Now community, even if you're someone who's reluctant to become a cable customer? So we're trying to do both and and create two slightly different use cases. The piece of it around your audience and your intended audience, I was wondering. I would say that for the average person, if you ask them like Fox News, MS Now, who do those networks reach? Who do those brands reach? I would say Fox News reaches Republicans and that's who has it on TV. That's who's going to that website. Right. I would say MSNOW reaches progressives, Democrats, left-leaning people.

12:49Is that a stated goal for you or do you want that tent to be bigger? It sounds like you want to welcome people from all political affiliations, but I want to hear that from you. I'm curious. Yeah. Is the audience for MSNOW different than the audience for Fox? Of course it is. There's probably like a small amount of overlap, but not a lot. And that's OK. But we want to be a place like I'll just give you an example. When I think forward to election night, I got to say, I think there's nowhere I'd rather hang out on election night than at our table with Rachel and Nicole and Lawrence and Chris and Michael and everyone.

13:29Like, what we try to do is be smart, respect our audience, and be a fun place. And a place where, again, Michael Steele is a big part of our election night. He was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Right. You know, so we have a broad range of views, but I think they all fall under that pro-democracy banner. Are you competitive? Like, do you want to beat Fox? Is that like, do you want to see that number one? Do you think about that? Look, I am a pretty competitive person. I think I just see who our competition is as wider than kind of like that typical cable landscape. I want to build a great product right now and have a large membership community.

14:21And I want to make sure that we are competing on every battleground. And that is yes, absolutely on cable. Yes, on digital. Yes, on YouTube. Yes, in audio. I think that because of the life that this brand's lived under previous ownership, pre-spin, there were times when our wings were clipped a little from a business perspective. And that wasn't if I was sitting in the seats of the leadership team at MVC, I might have made the same decisions. That model, when you're working for a very large, very successful company that NBCUniversal and Comcast are, they need to look at the whole company and figure out where best to invest their dollars.

15:12So what they did makes sense for them. But now we're lucky to be a part of Versant, where MSNow is a very successful part of Versant. And Versant has several pieces of their portfolio that we are lucky enough that generate a lot of cash. What is Versant? For someone who might not know what Versant is, what is Versant? Yeah. Versant is the spinoff, so a spin-out of NBCUniversal. So for folks that weren't following along day by day, around 18 months ago, NBCUniversal spun out a series of businesses. Those include what is now MS Now, CNBC, brands like E!, you know, Live from the Red Carpet, all of that, and then Golf.

16:04So it's a variety of businesses across media. We are now part of a company that is incentivized to invest the money that we earn as MS Now back into MS Now. We're just no longer part of a company that has to invest in theme parks and other things that for that company that made a lot of sense. But for Versant, it makes more sense to allow MSNOW to invest in ourselves. You've mentioned a few times that you are a real behemoth on cable television. I mean, number two to Fox, etc. I don't think it's a secret that cable news audiences are declining. And I'm going to ask this in the bluntest possible way.

16:47You know, that's an older audience, significantly older than a digital one. What do you do when they die? How are you thinking about that? So I think I am not blind to the long-term challenges. That's why we are investing in digital and building quickly. But do I think the cable business right now for MS Now is quite healthy? I do. And do I have a lot of respect for our audience who comes and joins us every morning, noon and night? And we have one of the highest loyalty engagement numbers in all of television. Our average viewer, average, watches nine hours a week. That is a lot of MSNOW. That's a lot.

17:34That's a lot. So do I like wake up in a panic in the middle of the night? No. oh, do I know there are long-term challenges? Yes. That's why we're launching a DTC product. What do you wake up at night worrying about? I mean, I think for anyone listening, just if you're not aware, working in media and journalism is hard. It's a hard business. And these are really difficult transformations to try to undertake and to undertake successfully. What's the hardest part of this for you right now? What I wake up angsty about sometimes is, you know, I know we have this guest or that guest coming up, but like I grew up in this school of TV of like the upgrade.

18:20Like how can we upgrade? How can we make it better? What is the better question? What is the better way in? I might be old school when I say this, but I think like content wins always every single race. And if you have like the thing, it's going to do you far more than all sorts of other like marketing dollars and product and all those things are incredibly important to get right. But at the end of the day, if your content isn't excellent, Yeah, you're in trouble. I want to ask more about talent. We talked about it a bit at the top. You do have some real sort of fandom magnets. I think one of the biggest challenges in publishing today, especially on digital, is that it is so noisy.

19:06There is so much competition. It's not just news, but it's everything on someone's Instagram feed. It's everything on their TikTok. It's, you know, recipe videos and random influencers and so on and so forth. How do you encourage your journalists, your talent, to break through that in a digital context? You know, when I think about, I'll just pick on Chris Hayes for a minute here, because like there's almost no time that I talk to Chris Hayes that I don't then hang up the phone or walk out of his office and think to myself, like, that guy's brain is huge. Like, I just learned 17 things that I didn't even think of something there.

19:48And I think that's the answer to your question of how do you break through. Every brand and every place in media has to figure out what their breakthrough is. Look, there's people who want to break through by showing cat videos all day. Yes. There's people who want to break through by writing outrageous headlines that aren't really based in facts. Where I want MS Now to break through is being brainiacs, is coming to the table with something that is intellectually interesting, that is showing me something or teaching me something or adding value to a news story in a way I hadn't thought about it before, of drawing on their experience, decades of experience working in the room, you know, being in the room where it happened.

20:39So what I ask each of our hosts to do is think, where can you add value? And then how can you make sure, and this is on all of us, how are we showing up with the audience in a way that they can see the value? in a way that they understand that what you're bringing to the table is different than some random person with, you know, 1 % of the experience or, like, thought that you spent your day. I mean, again, just going back to Chris, these guys write their shows. They're not just the talking head who's showing up and grabbing a script. You call one of them a couple hours before their show. They are sitting there tapping it out, framing it out.

21:31And I think it shows. I think when you watch what they have to say, it is differentiated because they rolled up their sleeves and gave of themselves to the audience. All right. Another quick break. We'll be right back.

21:52I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes, and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com.

22:29Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.

22:40What has the experience been like of transitioning some of the maybe more TV comfortable talent that you have who are accustomed to doing a, you know, a cable news show and saying to them, now you do these, you know, interactive sessions with our audience or you're going to. Now you do TikTok. Now you do now you participate in these other parts of the ecosystem. What has that been like for for you as the boss and maybe not to speak for them? And I realize I'm asking you to talk about your employees on the show, but but for them as as talent and as, you know, figureheads for this brand. Yeah. One of my rules is don't do anything that feels weird for you.

23:24And what I mean by that is if you in your own life don't use TikTok, I don't recommend trying to become a TikToker. Like, it's going to land weird. You know, we've seen it. So what I have encouraged our shows, our hosts, everyone in the MSNOW family is don't try to be everywhere. Don't try to be everything. Try to do where it feels organic and where native to you and your talents and your audience and where you actually spend time. Because I think that's where you find success. I mean, a great example, Simone Sanders is fantastic at TikTok. and Instagram because she grew up in those spaces and knows those audiences.

24:16That might not be the same for Lawrence O'Donnell. Lawrence O'Donnell is a huge hit on YouTube. So, like, we don't need to make everyone famous on every platform. We need to be smart and thoughtful and intentional about where people can succeed. What has Trump 2.0 been like for you guys over there? I mean, have you seen an audience bump? Have you seen fatigue? And how are you thinking about breaking through on that story? I mean, it's the challenge with the story of Trump 2.0 is that there are a thousand stories a day. How are you thinking about reaching your audience in a way that can grab them and hold them on that?

25:01Yeah, what I want our audience to know is that we are who we are and we're proud of who we are. And you can come to us on any platform at any time and trust that you are getting our best reporting and our best analysis without fear. And we haven't talked about it yet, but as part of the spin, we also had to build our entire own newsroom. What we tried to do is build our newsroom knowing the moment and not trying to, again, we're not trying to be commodity news. We're trying to build an absolutely kick-ass D.C. newsroom, and I think we've done that. We started to break a lot of news in D.C. Sue Deep Ready, who is our D.C.

25:53bureau chief there, came from Politico and the Wall Street Journal and has just assembled a really, really strong team. So what we're trying to do is win where our audience wants more. And those the basic pillars of that are White House Congress, justice, courts, all of that is one bucket, national security. And then we hired Shauna Thomas, who is just like she's great. Big, big, big brain. Yeah. And came from CBS and before that NBC. And just like one of the smartest people that understands how politics and media kind of work together. She's our political director, and she is building a team of killers to cover.

26:42We're already covering 2026, but really 2028. You guys, I mean, one of the very few media brands in growth mode right now. It's impressive. Speaking of, I'm curious about the Ellison-Warner Brothers discovery merger, combined CNN and CBS under one owner. Of course, you know, CBS at the very least under the leadership of Barry Weiss. I want to know sort of big picture your concerns about that possibility in particular. I'm also curious about what it means for MS now when you sort of look at that possibility. Is that potentially is this consolidation maybe good for you? Like, does this help you even if the broader implications of it are in some ways troubling?