MSNBC and NBC News, which have shared editorial resources going back to the cable news channel’s 1996 founding, will officially split beginning next month.
Scott Matthews, senior VP of newsgathering for MSNBC, outlined the timeline on the channel’s daily editorial call Wednesday.
The first key date will be Oct. 6, which is when NBC News staff that will be joining MSNBC move over to their new roles (for example, Vaughn Hillyard, NBC News White House correspondent, will become MSNBC White House correspondent on that day. All MSNBC staff will also begin using guidance from the newly-created MSNBC standards team.
Perhaps more notably, Oct. 6 is also the day when MSNBC will stop relying on NBC News correspondents and crews for all coverage outside of Washington, D.C. MSNBC will instead start to rely on its own reporters and crews.
Oct. 20 will be the next critical date, as that is the day when MSNBC will stop using NBC News resources in Washington, D.C. too, instead leaning on its newly-created Washington bureau, led by Sudeep Reddy, with the channel set to add new hires in the coming weeks.
The key dates mean that by the end of October, MSNBC will have effectively split off from NBC News and be operating on its own editorially, ahead of the long-planned Versant spinoff, currently expected to close in January.
Once Versant has officially separated from NBCU, MSNBC will change its name to MS NOW (it stands for “My Source for News, Opinion and the World”), and will no longer feature NBC’s iconic peacock logo in any branding. CNBC will also lose the peacock but keep its name.
