This week, NBC News announced that its charmingly dorky, hypercaffeinated, khaki-clad data
analytics expert Steve Kornacki had signed a new deal with the network’s news and sports divisions—a re-up that was most notable for the role it omitted. While Kornacki will continue to crunch election night polling data, NFL spreads, and Kentucky Derby odds for the broadcast network and the Peacock streaming service, he will no longer be offering his talents to MSNBC, which Comcast is spinning out into the wilderness along with almost all of its other cable channels
under the working title SpinCo. It was especially notable since Kornacki had come into the NBCU empire via MSNBC, in 2012, and only added NBC News to his C.V. five years later.

As I’ve long foreshadowed, the great NBCU cable spinout is catalyzing a number of contract renegotiations to determine the fate of the news division’s cross-channel talent—all the folks who worked for either NBC News or MSNBC, or both, but became reliable fixtures across platforms. Think Willie
Geist, a Morning Joe co-host who also anchors NBC’s Sunday Today, and often sits in on the flagship Today broadcast, or Stephanie Ruhle, the tireless post-primetime MSNBC host who rose early for her own Today segments, with presumably no more than four hours’ sleep in the interim.

The fate of these folks is really neither here nor there—presumably, if Willie wanted to keep a seat at Joe and
Mika’s roundtable, the powers that be could work out an Anderson Cooper–style dual-network deal that kept him on both channels (but, does he?); Ruhle, meanwhile, has already re-upped with MSNBC. Still, the Kornacki move is illustrative of a broader reality: The SpinCo breakup is setting these networks and their employees on alternate courses toward two radically different futures, which gives the current moment an air of Calvinist predestination—the
existential cafeteria crisis where you learn whether or not there’s a seat for you at the cool kids’ table. (There isn’t really a cool kids’ table anymore in this sector, but whatever.)

From the talent’s perspective, the distinction can be rather stark. NBCUniversal is a veritable
symphony of well-financed and sleekly produced enterprises that will furnish Kornacki with five-star treatment at Rockefeller Plaza for his appearances before millions, then whisk him away to the Super Bowl in San Francisco and the Winter Olympics in Milan. In recent years, MSNBC contributors sometimes had to pay their own Uber fare to 400 North Cap while applying their own powder. Sad, but justifiable when you’re averaging less than 600,000 viewers in total day and less than 60,000 in the
demo.

Of course, Brian Roberts’ strategic breakup of the NBCU linear assets portended the awkward dynamics of this split. While casting the rest of the cable portfolio out under the guidance of Mark Lazarus, he kept Bravo in the NBC portfolio because it was a core asset for Peacock, with I.P. like Real Housewives and Below Deck regularly among the top 10 most watched shows on the streaming service. Needless to say, the same couldn’t be
said for Syfy’s The Ark or Oxygen’s Prosecuting Evil (be honest, are you familiar with either?). In essence, Kornacki drew the Bravo card; his talents at “the big board” is enough of a value add—on election nights, the Today show, or the SNF pregame—to secure him a seat on the last lifeboat off the Titanic.

And what of those left behind? To their credit, they’re all doing a wonderful job of keeping the music going. The message from Laz and the
front office promises the dawn of a well-capitalized, debt-free, independent media entity that can use its profits to pursue new growth opportunities and acquire other businesses and channels. At MSNBC, in particular, newly appointed chief Rebecca Kutler—a smart and competitive leader, which is a rare species in TV news these days—is infusing the liberal network with a startup mentality: new leadership, new bureaus, new primetime lineup, new talent, and a hundred new job
postings. “I actually think building a news organization from scratch is a really fun idea in this day and age because, first of all, there’re a lot of good people available, and you can craft a pretty good news organization for a pretty reasonable amount of money,” former CNN president and onetime NBCU C.E.O. Jeff Zucker told New York’s Charlotte Klein, who suggested that MSNBC’s post-NBC future might actually be “kind of bright.”

Nearer, my
God, to thee. Yes, SpinCo will inevitably use debt or private equity to finance the acquisition of other subprime media assets, like AMC or some of the underloved Turner networks that David Zaslav himself set aside in an internal restructuring (likely presaging WBD’s own future SpinCo). Meanwhile, MSNBC will enjoy the thrill of standing up new shows and bureaus and, in a best-case scenario, reversing some pretty substantive post-election losses in the demo. If
those are your metrics for success, and you can keep the blinders on, then yes, MSNBC could be an exciting place to work for the next two to three years. Still, as I’ve noted before, it’s disingenuous for management to suggest to MSNBC employees that their network is in a stronger position after its uncoupling from a $140 billion conglomerate—and that they’re not on the path toward a much, much smaller future, and an exit to private equity by the end of the decade.

Of
course, one irony about the news media is that the probing and inquisitive journalists who populate it very often don’t understand all that much about the economics of their own business. Presumably, a numbers guy like Kornacki does.