According to Deadline, MSNBC is set to rebrand itself as My Source News Opinion World, also known as MS NOW. This comes as a result of their split from Comcast, which will also lose the news channel’s association with the Peacock logo.
As Deadline reports, MSNBC and other former Comcast Cable channels are set to form a new company called Versant following the split. Versant will be led by Mark Lazarus.
The channel was expected to retain it’s original name, a name which it has had since it’s 1996 launch. While the change was unexpected, according to Deadline, but executives determined that retaining the name would lead to brand confusion with NBC.
Per Deadline, MSNBC president Rebecca Cutler discussed the change in a memo to employees on Monday. “During this time of transition, NBCUniversal decided that our brand requires a new, separate identity,” she wrote. “This decision now allows us to set our own course and assert our independence as we continue to build our own modern newsgathering operation. The future of our success is not tied to remaining within the NBC family and using the peacock as part of our identity. While our name will be changing, who we are and what we do will not. Our commitment to our work and our audiences will not waiver from what the brand promise has been for three decades.”
Deadline posits that, since the channel is sometimes referred to by viewers as “MSN,” the name change to MS NOW will differentiate itself from its original name while keeping the familiar “MSN” acronym.
Rachel Maddow, the network’s top anchor, voiced her support for the name change on the Pivot podcast, according to Deadline. “We’re spinning off with a huge standalone, newly built news gathering organization that is designed specifically for our purposes and nothing else,” she said. “We have an incredibly loyal, very large audience, and we’re universally platformed on a device called the television, which Americans use, despite media reports to the contrary.”