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MSNBC planned to keep its name when it spun off, some would say NBC News orphaned it, but things have not worked out that way. NBC has decided not to share its name, which means that MSNBC will be known as MS NOW.
MSNBC will have to take a new name in months to come as it seeks to carve out an identity that will have it competing for scoops and news with current corporate sibling NBC News. MSNBC will soon come to be known as My Source for News Opinion and the World, or MS NOW, following the spin off of the bulk of NBCUniversal’s cable assets into a new publicly traded company called Versant. The changes were detailed in a memo to staffers Monday by Mark Lazarus, who will run Versant as its founding CEO.
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MSNBC had planned to keep its name, but NBCU recently decided to retain its famous Peacock design and markings and not share them, requiring Versant to make changes to some of its networks that use those insignia and the NBC logo, Lazarus said.
There are even more changes coming. A lot of familiar NBC News faces will be vanishing from MSNBC. The network is hiring its own journalists and building a standalone news gathering apparatus.
MSNBC is already primarily an opinion network. Its highest-rated shows feature discussion of the news and not news reporting, so it will be interesting to see if the content direction changes much at MSN(OW)BC.
The idea that MSNBC could transition to standing on its own and that viewers would not notice has been thrown out the window.
This is a big change, and while I understand that the network might be making lemonade out of lemons, in a television landscape that features CNN and FOX, the name MS NOW feels clunky and awkward.
If the network was going to rebrand, my instinct was that they should have gone for it, instead of a sort of halfway, play-it-safe new name and logo that is functional, but feels unsatisfying.
What do you think of the name MS NOW? Join the discussion in the comments below.
