TV Talk: Pittsburgh native helps relaunch MSNBC as MS NOW

Beginning Saturday, MSNBC will be no more. The cable news network’s new name will be MS NOW, a rebrand necessitated by NBCUniversal’s decision to spin off most of its cable networks into a separate company, Versant.

Earlier this year, Pittsburgh native Meghan Rafferty, a 2003 Oakland Catholic High School grad, made the jump from NBC to MS NOW following a four-year stint as executive producer of “NBC Nightly News” anchored by Lester Holt.

Rafferty, who grew up in Churchill, said that the only substantive change for viewers in the switch from MSNBC to MS NOW is the network’s name and graphics. The shows, hosts, mission and more liberal bent are expected to remain the same. (Versant wanted to keep MS in the name so the network’s channel position won’t change in cable guides’ alphabetical lineup.)

“The way we cover stories won’t change,” Rafferty said. “It’s all really just the name change.”

Rafferty’s interest in a journalism career spiked at Boston University when she started writing for her campus newspaper, but she said Pittsburgh helped lay the groundwork.

“Pittsburgh is a place that, growing up, you’re always immersed in so many different cultures that are so different and there are so many different kinds of celebrations of culture,” she said. “And it’s also the place where there’s so much future innovation running through this place that was so central to the Industrial Revolution. … So you feel very much like a student of history.”

In addition to breeding a drive and curiosity that Rafferty said grounds her as a journalist, having her Pittsburgh background “makes me better at what I do sitting here in New York, because I go back home, because I talk to people back home, and, especially in election years, I think it’s very helpful to have the pulse of a place like Pittsburgh regularly, because you really know what voters think, and you really know what’s happening outside of this Northeastern corridor.”

Rafferty interned at NBC’s “Weekend Today” and, after college, spent a decade in various roles at CNN, including on the morning show and in the documentary unit as Christiane Amanpour’s producer, as a field producer in the Northeast and as Wolf Blitzer’s producer in Washington, D.C.

She returned to NBC News in 2017 and became “Nightly News” executive producer in 2021.

“In that job you’re curating all the top news of the day for audiences and boiling it down into a 22-minute news broadcast,” Rafferty said. “Lester and I were the consummate team. The two of us were always bouncing ideas off of each other and debating in a fun way — we’re both news nerds — what we thought would be the most important, most impactful, newest story to tell [as the newscast’s lead story].”

Rafferty said she loved her job at “Nightly News,” but she was ready for a change.

“It was time for me to stretch my legs journalistically,’ she said, “because it’s a very formulaic day and show that you have [with ‘Nightly News’], and I really wanted to grow and learn, too.”

In July, Rafferty was named vice president of news standards, overseeing MS NOW and CNBC. She describes standards as “almost that moral compass for the news division,” with tasks that include reviewing scripts and working with reporters on exclusive source reporting.

“You get to work with shows and anchors and make sure that anything that’s [being reported] is grounded in fact,” Rafferty said. “We’re working with new reporters as well, helping train them and teach them about best practices when it comes to reporting.”

She also felt the timing was right to move into a role at a network where political news is at the forefront of coverage.

“I cannot imagine a more important time to do that,” she said. “It’s very refreshing, the level of depth that we get to give to politics news here.”

Conventional wisdom in media circles suggests NBCUniversal is cutting loose its cable channels due to the inexorable decline of cable as more consumers cut the cord. But Rafferty isn’t phased by doom and gloom suggestions. Instead, she’s happy to be part of building a news operation that will no longer share reporters and resources with NBC News. (e.g. MS NOW and CNBC will get weather forecasts from AccuWeather rather than relying on NBC meteorologists.)

“I feel very energized by the innovative, more entrepreneurial thinking at MS,” Rafferty said. “We have a lot of journalists who are really serious journalists who are getting us scoops, and we’re untethered from legacy news models.”

Channel surfing

Idris Elba will return as “Luther” in a new Netflix movie; even better, Ruth Wilson will return as dangerous Alice in this sequel. … FX renewed “Alien: Earth” for a second season. … On Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the host mourned the death of his show’s musical director, Cleto Escobedo III.