Latr this month a few thouand of MS NOW‘s biggest fans will descend on College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington for what the news brand says will be its biggest event yet: “MS NOW Live: Together in Texas.”
The event comes at a critical moment for MS NOW, which this week launched its first subscription offering, the MS NOW membership. The Texas event, it turns out, will be a testing ground, in more ways than one. MS NOW members attending the live event (and those attending a live taping of The Weeknight this week) will discover a dedicated members lounge, with a bar, comfortable seating, and the opportunity to mingle with other super fans as well as some of the channel’s talent.
“As a long timer in our business, I feel like it’s really, really different,” says Marcus Mabry, MS NOW’s senior VP of content strategy, “I’ve never had anything like this in any other news space I’ve been in, we actually want to emphasize people being together, and that’s really powerful.”
“We’ve ignored humanity for some reason,” he adds. “So even down to the decor, the offerings of food and beverage, even down to that, it’s about warmth and celebration, and it celebrates of our democracy, which we don’t often do that much these days in our country.”
Mabry says that MS NOW intends to pop up member lounges throughout the year, likely tied to live MS NOW events or news events, a real-life benefit to a digital subscription, and one of many features that executives at the cable channel hope will help it stand out in a crowded space for subscriptions.
“Our challenge is to prove to our audience, which is many million strong, that this is worth their time and this is worth their wallet, and we are pretty humble about the task in front of us, and we know that it’s a busy, crowded marketplace,” MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler says, when asked by The Hollywood Reporter in the company’s New York headquarters about entering a crowded market. “We think through our research that we have found a white space that’s meaningful. We think we are creating something that doesn’t currently exist, and now it’s on our team to deliver on that and earn, earn our members, earn the community.”
The membersip will have plenty of video content, of course. All the MS NOW shows are there, as are a slate of originals, including interview programs hosted by Rachel Maddow and Claire McCaskill, a data-centric program led by Ali Velshi, The Very Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, and a legal show led by Andrew Weissmann.
But the company is leaning into the other stuff even more: Live Q&A’s with anchors and correspondents, twice per day, including standing Q&A’s every week with the likes of Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough.
The talent has fully bought in.
“For us on the talent side, we all raised our hands because we also know what the future looks like, right?” says Stephanie Ruhle, who will also do weekly Q&As. “This wasn’t a question of, do we want to enter into a new venture with Rebecca? We make great shows and we feel great about it, but it’s not a secret that linear TV is going in one direction, and so none of us are saying, ‘well, we’re going to jump off this ship.’ We’re saying we are part of an amazing machine. We see where the future is. Why don’t we maintain what we have and now jump into this new venture? That’s not a giant financial investment for our company, that’s an investment for all of us in our collective futures.”
There will be news, but not too much news, and at the end of the day’s top stories, there will be a dedicated mindfulness experience, in partnership with Calm.
In their research, executives found that consumers “said they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of news. They said they were isolated, either because they were blue dots in red states, or because they were afraid to wade into the cesspool that is social media. And they told us they were anxious, either about the state of the country, or the state of the world, or frankly the future of our democracy,” says Mabry.
“So what we’ve done in the MS NOW membership and app is we’ve built a product designed to confront overwhelm with concise curation, to defeat isolation with connection, both to our journalists and to each other, and to confront anxiety by giving our members agency,” he adds.
“I don’t know whose idea was to put wellness into this thing, but it’s brilliant because that is literally the antidote to everything I hear,” quips Velshi, speaking to reporters in MS NOW’s office this week.
The mindfulness content will include meditation exercises, but also content from doctors, therapists and psychologists, not to mention former ABC News correspondent Dan Harris, who left ABC five years ago to focus on his meditation company.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity here, and there’s a real service that can be provided,” Harris says. “A lot of people feel like they need their anxiety and anger in order to do anything in this environment, and I get that. I’m not trying to deny you your anger, I just don’t think it’s the cleanest burning fuel. I think the cleanest burning fuel is a regulated nervous system that allows you to respond wisely with maximum effectiveness.”
But getting together in real life will be a big piece of it, through big events, members lounges, and even live tapings of episodes like The Weeknight, which will also be heading to Texas.
“I think this is actually very transformative,” says Weeknight co-host Symone Sanders. “It is no small thing that a news organization, especially in this economy, is investing in their folks going on the road, but also investing in in-person experiences. It feels kind of BravoCon-ish, if you will.”
“It is building on the connections, the parasocial relationship, frankly, that we build with our audience for the people that tune in with us every night. But I think this kind of investment is the future, and we’ve clearly got something going,” she continued. “We are inviting people to our table, and so we want folks to feel like they are literally sitting down having dinner with us every night. And the in-person aspect of that just allows us to magnify it even more.”
If CNN’s subscription is for news junkies, and Fox Nation is for Fox fans, MS NOW thinks it can carve out a slice of the business that is distinct, and less dependent on a linear TV brand that is sliding in one direction.
“We believe, and you’ll hear me say this over and over again, our brand is to be pro-democracy, and if you are pro-democracy, kind of subhead A of that is strong, free, and fair press, and that is a huge part of what we are building, both for our DTC community and for the overall MS NOW brand,” Kutler says.