Energy, not ‘strategy,’ will be new at MSNBC

In the last couple of years, as Fox News Channel vaulted to first place in the cable news race, NBC appeared willing to let its MSNBC outlet chug along in third.

Not any more. Tuesday, as expected, NBC, which runs the channel and co-owns it with Microsoft, named ABC News’ Rick Kaplan as the new president of MSNBC.

Kaplan, 56, is expected to bring a new energy to the channel, which has changed programming strategies and identities frequently, never particularly successfully.

Kaplan, who had been a senior vice president at ABC, replaces Erik Sorenson, who had been running MSNBC since 1998 and now moves to a new job at NBC News working on long-term projects.

Kaplan, a respected industry veteran who previously ran CNN, said he isn’t bringing yet another strategy to the network, noting the channel is “getting out of the game of ‘network du jour,’ today we’re this, tomorrow we’re that.”

Instead, he said, he plans to work with the anchors and hosts and producers already in place.

“I think the biggest problem is that we have a lot of anchors who deserve more recognition,” he said. “We need to make a better connection with the audience, to grow these programs up.”

“Not enough thought has been given to the heart of the production, that intangible that viewers somehow feel when they watch,” he added.

NBC’s apparent plan to get more aggressive with MSNBC comes at the same time it is overhauling prime-time programming on its business news channel, CNBC. That network just added a nightly program hosted by comedian Dennis Miller and a weekly program from former magazine editor Tina Brown. Tennis great John McEnroe is about to join the lineup with his own program.

Although NBC executives weren’t happy with MSNBC being in third place, that channel has always fulfilled one key mission, offsetting NBC News’ high news-gathering costs, by providing another outlet for all the video that is collected but sees only limited air time on NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today” shows. The strategy worked relatively well during last year’s Iraq war, when NBC News correspondents appeared frequently on the news channel.

But MSNBC’s prime-time programming, where a network makes most of its money, has never taken off. Following Fox’s lead, MSNBC in recent years decided to find a lineup of opinionated talk hosts, but the choices didn’t click with viewers.

The current prime-time lineup includes Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Deborah Norville and Dan Abrams.