MS NOW Tests Live-Audience Format With Membership Push — SkimNews
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- MS NOW launched a "Membership" subscription requiring anchors including Stephanie Ruhle, Ali Velshi, Rachel Maddow, Jen Psaki, and "Morning Joe" hosts to host sessions with subscribers, with the next in-person event slated for Dallas and Arlington later this week.
- Stephanie Ruhle tested the live-audience format on Thursday's "Money Power Politics" from an Englewood Cliffs, N.J., studio shared with Versant sibling CNBC, where her mother Louise and other audience members posed unfiltered questions on health insurance, polarization, and AI to on-set guest Rahm Emanuel.
- Versant Media-backed MS NOW plans to deploy more on-screen talent to in-studio crowds, live events, and a new app featuring unscripted twice-daily conversations between users and the network's anchors and correspondents.
- Marcus Mabry, MS NOW's SVP for content strategy, said member response to two-way conversations has been "so rewarding," with members actively engaging both with journalists and with each other.
- Ruhle, a former Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank banker who describes herself as "extremely dyslexic" and does not work from a teleprompter like many colleagues, said she would like to do live-audience broadcasts "every day" but acknowledged "once a week" is more realistic.
- The move comes as younger viewers gravitate toward independent digital journalists, newsletters, and video podcasts — a shift that has already pushed Fox's Sean Hannity (2023), Chris Hayes at NBCUniversal, and NBC's Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager to try in-studio audience formats, some cut off by the pandemic.
Why it matters: MS NOW is converting its biggest primetime brands — Maddow, Psaki, Ruhle, Velshi, Morning Joe — into recurring subscriber touchpoints as linear cable revenue shrinks and younger audiences migrate to independent digital creators. The Dallas and Arlington event signals a deliberate push beyond MS NOW's blue-state comfort zone to test whether the membership model can draw paying audiences in markets not historically aligned with its primetime lineup.
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