MS NOW Wants to Turn Its Viewers Into a Fandom

I would say that, for the average person, if you ask them, “Fox News, MS NOW, who do those networks reach?” I would say Fox News reaches Republicans, and that’s who has it on TV, that's who’s going to that website. I would say MS NOW reaches progressives, Democrats, left-leaning people. Is that a stated goal for you, or do you want that tent to be bigger?

Is the audience for MS NOW different from the audience for Fox? Of course it is. There's probably a small amount of overlap, but not a lot, and that's OK.

For example, when I think forward to election night, I gotta say, I think there’s nowhere I'd rather hang out on election night than at our table with Rachel and Nicolle [Wallace] and Lawrence and Chris [Hayes] and Michael [Steele] and everyone.

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.

We have a broad range of views, but I think they all fall under that pro-democracy banner.

Are you competitive? Do you want to beat Fox? Do you want to see that number one?

Look, I am a pretty competitive person. I just see who our competition is as wider than that typical cable landscape.

I want to build a great product right now and have a large membership community, and I want to make sure that we are competing on every battleground.

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 lived under previous ownership, 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 NBC, I might have made the same decisions.

When you’re working for the very large, very successful companies that NBCUniversal and Comcast are, they need to look at the whole company and figure out where best to invest their dollars. So what they did makes sense for them. But now we're lucky to be a part of Versant, and Versant has several pieces of their portfolio that generate a lot of cash.

What is Versant, for those who may not know?

Versant is the spinoff, so a spinout, of NBCUniversal. For folks that weren't following along day by day, around a year 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—and then golf.

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, made a lot of sense.