Rashida Jones stepped down as president of MSNBC on Tuesday after nearly four years in the job.
Credit...Gabriela Herman for The New York Times

Rashida Jones, MSNBC President, Steps Down

Rebecca Kutler, senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC, will serve as the cable network’s interim president.

by · NY Times

The president of MSNBC, Rashida Jones, stepped down on Tuesday, a major change at the cable network as it waits to see if loyal liberal viewers will tune back in when President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office.

Rebecca Kutler, senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC, succeeded Ms. Jones as interim president, the company said. Ms. Jones, who held the job for nearly four years, will stay on in an advisory role through March.

Ms. Jones exited amid ratings pressure on the cable news industry and on MSNBC in particular, whose left-leaning programming has suffered a sharp decline in viewership since Mr. Trump’s election in November. Executives have said that the post-election ratings dip is normal and that they anticipate a rebound as Mr. Trump settles into his second term.

MSNBC is also among a bundle of cable channels that its parent company, Comcast, will spin out this year into a new company. The spinoff will sever MSNBC from the news-gathering engine of NBC News, its longtime corporate cousin, and the cable network said on Tuesday that it would seek to hire a new head of news gathering and a new head of talent.

“We have a lot to do,” Mark Lazarus, the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, who will oversee the new company that includes MSNBC, told colleagues in a call on Tuesday announcing Ms. Jones’s departure.

Mr. Lazarus also said MSNBC would retain its name after the spinoff, and he offered a vote of confidence in Ms. Kutler, calling her “the ideal leader to guide us through this moment.”

Ms. Kutler joined MSNBC in 2022 from CNN, where she was an architect of CNN+, the ambitious streaming news service that was shut down that year after a new corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, subsumed the network.

Total viewership of MSNBC has been cut roughly in half since Election Day, according to statistics from Nielsen. On Monday, the network announced that Rachel Maddow, its most popular host, would return to broadcasting her one-hour show every weeknight at 9 Eastern for Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office.

Ms. Jones rose through the ranks of MSNBC and NBC News over more than a decade, previously overseeing daytime and weekend news programming. Her career began in local television news, and she once served as a director of live programming for the Weather Channel.

Ms. Jones made several programming changes during her tenure atop MSNBC, which began in February 2021. She appointed Alex Wagner to succeed Ms. Maddow as host of its 9 p.m. hour four days a week and extended “Morning Joe,” its flagship morning chat show, to a fourth hour. There were also some high-profile departures, including Mehdi Hasan, the anchor of a Sunday night show that was canceled.

She was also in charge during an extraordinary on-air revolt over a decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, as a commentator for NBC News and MSNBC. Ms. Maddow, the “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough and others expressed their chagrin over the hire, and Ms. McDaniel was cut loose days later.

Ms. Jones has not yet announced her post-MSNBC plans. She still had time remaining on her contract, according to three people familiar with the details of her deal.

On Tuesday’s call, Ms. Maddow said Ms. Jones had served as a “heat shield” that protected MSNBC’s anchors from pressure that would have otherwise been brought down on them.

“Other companies don’t run that way, and it is because you’ve been insistent that we treat each other respectfully and that you’ll be the one who takes the outside heat,” Ms. Maddow said.

Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.

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