MS NOW’s new ‘Morning Joe’ newsletter wants to look like a magazine

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is ready to spill the tea in a new newsletter.

Called The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe, the revamped newsletter for the popular morning show on the network that will soon be called MS NOW (the name change is official on November 15, the network says) took its inspiration from the world of print magazines. It’s designed to be part of a larger flywheel to grow and connect with the show’s audience.

“We wanted something that was visually arresting, that was simple, elegant, and that people could read and get insight from,” Scarborough tells Fast Company.

The newsletter will be sent in the early afternoon, Monday through Friday, and feature daily, original illustrations from illustrator Natalie Sanders. Scarborough says if the secret to Julia Child’s cooking is butter, butter, and butter, the secret to the newsletter will be “white space, white space, and white space.” This isn’t meant to be a dense newsletter.

“I don’t want picture, block of text, picture, block of text, picture block of text,” Scarborough says, adding that editor Graydon Carter’s work at Vanity Fair and the newsletter Air Mail “was a bit of an inspiration for me.”

“I liked how he still focused on the visual,” he says.

As MSNBC’s outgoing parent company, Comcast’s NBCUniversal, splits into two, its cable portfolio—consisting of MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, E!, SyFy, and the Golf Channel—is becoming an independent company called Versant. That means for the first time in its 30-year history, MSNBC is operating independently from NBC News.

Per the breakup agreement, the liberal-leaning cable news and opinion network has to drop the “NBC” from its name, hence the rebrand to MS NOW, an acronym for “My Source for News, Opinion, and the World.” It has built out its own Washington bureau for news gathering and signed a multiyear deal with the London-based Sky News for international coverage, and the shows are adapting to a future in which an increasing number of people watch clips online instead of on traditional TV.

Standing on its own also means MS NOW shows will need to build deeper relationships with their audiences and find new revenue models at a time when cable subscribers continue to cut their cords. Already, the network is building a live events business as a new revenue line, and the Morning Joe newsletter shows how it’s building new digital products to be integrated with the show.

The Tea extends the Morning Joe brand into the afternoon, with each issue including one daily video from the morning’s show, and it also gives the hosts a direct line to their audience.

Subscribers will get exclusive invites to virtual town halls with Scarborough, cohosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, and others, and each issue will include a form for reader questions that the network says will be answered in future issues or shows.

Scarborough says the look of the newsletter is “a bit more avant-garde than any cable news show,” and considering he’s no longer working for a traditional TV news conglomerate parent company, like GE or Comcast, he’s rethinking the tone and approach he can take with the newsletter.

Scarborough says he told MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler that “we’re going to be taking chances, and I can’t have people freaking out every day.” He tested the network’s front office in a mock-up prototype newsletter that dropped an f-bomb in the daily quote section. The only questions they got back from the mock-up issue were technical, like about wrapping the text around the images, but there were no qualms about the expletive.

“That is like, whoa, we’re not in Kansas anymore, baby,” Scarborough says. “I do want something that is going to be culturally relevant, politically relevant, wherever that may be, and they’re giving us freedom to do that.”

He describes the mentality of Versant as that of a startup and says it’s “radically different than what we’ve seen over the past 20 years.”

When considering names for the newsletter, Scarborough says he and his team considered names that played off Morning Joe, like The Press, but The Tea seemed to better capture the tone he was going for.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh no, no, no, we can’t do that. It’s not serious enough.’ I go, ‘Exactly,’” Scarborough says.

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