Variety: Rashida Jones to Exit MSNBC; Rebecca Kutler Named Interim President

Story from Variety:

Rashida Jones, a respected news operator who has led MSNBC for four years, will leave the NBCUniversal cable outlet to pursue other opportunities, she informed executives and staffers Tuesday.

She will be replaced on an interim basis by Rebecca Kutler, a veteran news executive with a long track record of managing talent and devising innovative programming concepts. She takes the lead role at MSNBC as it faces not only the challenges of covering the Trump administration for its demoralized liberal audience, but also the prospect of being spun off into a new publicly traded company by corporate parent Comcast.

The executive swap takes place as MSNBC is grappling with a significant downturn in its ratings. Between the election and the end of 2024, MSNBC’s primetime audience between the ages of 25 and 54 — the demographic most prized by advertisers in news programming — fell 65%, according to data from Nielsen. There has been concern that the network, which specializes in progressive opinion programming, is suffering from viewer fatigue after Donald Trump won election to a second term in office. A decision by MSNBC morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to meet with President-elect Trump has spurred theories about backlash from MSNBC’s liberal base.

Kutler joined MSNBC as senior vice president of content strategy in 2022, after a long run at CNN. During her time at the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed outlet, she not only worked as an executive producer for Don Lemon and John King, among others, but played a role in establishing personalities such as Abby Phillip, Van Jones, Chris Wallace, Audie Cornish and Kasie Hunt at the network. She was poised to have a senior role at CNN+, the streaming outlet that was scuttled after launch by CNN’s corporate parent.

During a meeting with staffers Tuesday, Mark Lazarus, who will lead the new spin-off company that will include MSNBC, said Kutler had full authority to make any decisions she felt were necessary for MSNBC in weeks ahead. He also told employees that Kutler would seek a new head of newsgathering and a new head of talent. And they were informed that the MSNBC name will remain even when the network joins the new company. There had been concern in recent weeks that the looming separation of MSNBC and CNBC from NBC News would force bigger changes that might undermine some of the networks’ look and brand.

One person familiar with the situation said Jones felt the time had come to consider other roles after an intense cycle that has involved not only managing a primetime schedule as Rachel Maddow, the star of the network, scaled back her presence, but exploring digital projects and live events as linear audiences migrate to streaming. Others felt she was not hands-on enough with an array of particularly outspoken anchors, who have increasingly felt free to go on air and blast decisions made by senior NBC News executives and managers.

Jones rose quickly at NBC News, where she became known for devising intriguing spectacles and special reports, including a 2019 town-hall report from Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where Lester Holt moderated a discussion of criminal justice reform. “We have never done anything like this,” Jones told Variety at the time. “This is just taking the spirit of that town-hall conversation and taking it up ten notches.”

That creativity manifested itself at MSNBC, as Jones expanded “Morning Joe” by an hour and created a sort of “pop-up” program known internally as “The Avengers” that has Maddow lead a dais of MSNBC opinion hosts during moments of critical national news import.

During her time at MSNBC, she lured former Biden White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki to the network, whose presence continues to expand. And she tried to establish a daytime beachhead of news programming that has been kept separate from MSNBC’s opinion shows. MSNBC has outflanked CNN at many points during critical news events, a dynamic that has not been the case over the years.