In a bid to catch up to Fox News — the dominant news network by a longshot — and CNN, MSNBC is taking a trip back to the middle.
Moving disgraced NBC anchor Brian Williams over to the cable network appears to be a key part of this strategy, reports the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint. Chuck Todd, Meet the Press anchor and veteran political reporter, will anchor a political news show in the afternoons, and the whole day will be more tailored to coverage of breaking news. Morning Joe, hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, will remain. Meanwhile, MSNBC is dropping Ed Schultz’s The Ed Show and Now with Alex Wagner.
Primetime’s more liberal leanings, featuring Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews, is expected to remain intact, although All In With Chris Hayes could be on the bubble, reports Flint.
The changes are concurrent to the return to the network of Andy Lack, who ran NBC News from 1993 to 2001 and came back last March.
Ratings for MSNBC, owned by Comcast Corp., are small. During some morning hours, its audience is smaller than 50,000 people. Its total day average audience through July of this year is 325,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. In prime time, MSNBC has averaged 542,000 viewers.
Fox News, on the other hand, averages one million viewers per day, with that number increasing to 1.7 million in prime time. CNN averages 550,000 viewers. Those numbers translate to $217.2 million in advertising revenue for MSNBC this year, according to SNL Kagan, compared to $330 million for CNN and $801.4 million for Fox.
While the network was named MSNBC because it launched as a now-defunct partnership between NBC and Microsoft, there are no plans to change the name since it’s now a brand with which news-watchers are well familiar.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
Brief Take: MSNBC’s problem might run deeper than just changing its point of view, considering that customers are rapidly turning toward unbundled options.
Image courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.
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