MSNBC, Spinning Out of NBCUniversal, Rebrands as ‘MS NOW’ With a Godawful Backronym and Even Worse Logo

Wednesday, 20 August 2025

Sara Fischer, Axios:

MSNBC, the progressive cable network owned by NBCUniversal, is rebranding to MS NOW, an acronym that stands for My Source for News, Opinion and the World.

The rebrand is part of a wider effort by NBCU to create a distinction between the cable networks it plans to spin out and the remaining NBCU parent company. As part of the rebrand, select cable networks that will be spun out into Versant, including CNBC, Golf Channel, GolfNow, MSNBC and SportsEngine, will all drop the iconic peacock logo that has for decades served as NBCU’s logo.

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, “Versant” itself is a pretty bad name (feels so vague — seems like the name of a fake company in a movie or TV show) so it’s no surprise that the same nitwits are botching Versant’s rebranded properties. But given that NBCUniversal is apparently forcing MSNBC to take the “NBC” out of its name, “MSNOW” isn’t a bad new name. But it’s not a good new name either. And they’re apparently using a space: “MS NOW”, yet also seem confused (or haven’t even decided yet) whether it’s supposed to be pronounced letter-by-letter (em ess en bee see) or as two letters and a word (em ess now). Saying the “NOW” as the word now makes sense for a 24/7 channel, but if it’s a word, the whole name should be styled “MS Now”. (Fox News styles their name as “FOX News” in some places, but never pretends the f-o-x is an acronym.)

The “My Source News Opinion World” backronym is so dumb it boggles the mind. I genuinely wonder if someone had ChatGPT do that. You can have a series of letters as a name — especially as a TV channel — without those letters really standing for anything. CNN is technically an acronym for “Cable News Network” but they’ve effectively just been “CNN” for decades now. The name “MSNBC” came from the fact that, at launch in the 1990s, it debuted as a collaboration between Microsoft’s MSN and NBC News. But Microsoft hasn’t been involved with the cable channel for 20 years — the “MS” in “MSNBC” hasn’t stood for anything since 2005. (In fact, MSN itself is another good example. It originally stood for “Microsoft Network”, even though Microsoft has never styled their name with a camel-cased S. But it’s really just “MSN” now.)¹

Tom Gara, writing on Threads:

The only real fuck up with the MSNBC rebrand is that they made up a dumb sounding fake acronym. It’s completely unnecessary! Just say “we’re changing our name to MS NOW to reflect the urgency of the moment.” Nobody has ever thought about what the old acronym stood for and nobody needed a new fake one.

There is another fuck up, though: the logo is atrocious. What is that flag? It looks like the Austrian flag (🇦🇹), not America’s. But are we sure it even is a flag? Maybe it’s a paper receipt and the red stripes are those marks when it’s time to replace the roll? Jonathan Hoefler, on Threads:

My personal benchmark for a logo is that it shouldn’t look like a pension fund.

The oddest part about the whole situation is that CNBC is being spun out into Versant, too, but while they’re losing the NBC peacock logo, they’re just keeping their name, unchanged. From CNBC’s own coverage of MSNBC’s rebranding:

While MSNBC and NBC News will have duplications in coverage, CNBC’s news organization is already separate enough from NBC News that executives decided it didn’t need a name change. Also, technically, the “NBC” in “CNBC” never stemmed from National Broadcasting Co. Rather, CNBC stands for “Consumer News and Business Channel.”

Lastly, shoutout to M.G. Siegler for coining the term peacockblocked to describe MSNBC’s branding plight.