Versant to rename MSNBC, drop peacock logos

MSNBC will change its name later this year and drop the storied peacock image from its branding — the first real public-facing changes in Versant’s upcoming separation from Comcast’s NBCUniversal.

The political news network will be renamed My Source News Opinion World, or MS Now, Versant Chief Executive Officer Mark Lazarus wrote in an internal memo to employees that was seen by CNBC.

In January, Lazarus told a group of MSNBC staffers that the network wouldn’t change its name. But during the past few months of transition planning, NBCUniversal leaders decided MSNBC should take on a new name “to accelerate the distinction between the MSNBC and NBC News organizations,” Lazarus wrote in the memo Monday.

MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler added in her own note to employees that the news group’s focus won’t change.

“While our name will be changing, who we are and what we do will not. Our commitment to our work and our audiences will not waiver from what the brand promise has been for three decades,” she wrote.

MSNBC has been undergoing aggressive hiring for about 100 new positions to stand up its own newsroom independent from NBC News. The network has already hired about 40 journalists from CNN, Bloomberg, Politico and other news organizations to establish its first-ever Washington, D.C., bureau.

“During this time of transition, NBCUniversal decided that our brand requires a new, separate identity,” Kutler wrote. “This decision now allows us to set our own course and assert our independence as we continue to build our own modern newsgathering operation.”

While MSNBC and NBC News will have duplications in coverage, such as covering politics, CNBC’s news organization is already separate enough from NBC News that executives decided it didn’t need a name change, according to people familiar with the matter. Also, technically, the “NBC” in “CNBC” never stemmed from National Broadcasting Company. Rather, CNBC stands for “Consumer News and Business Channel.”

Still, CNBC will likewise be getting a new logo without the famed NBCUniversal peacock. This will be true for all of Versant’s brands that have a peacock in the logo. Sports content on the USA network and Golf Channel will be branded together under USA Sports. Digital companies GolfNow and SportsEngine will also change their logos.

The MSNBC name change and the new logos will all be introduced before the end of the year, when Versant plans to spin out as a publicly traded company.

MSNBC will soon kick off a national marketing campaign to accompany the launch of the new name, “unlike anything we have done in recent memory,” Kutler noted in her memo Monday.

MSNBC is the second-most watched cable news network, averaging 1.2 million primetime viewers year-to-date. The network has 28 on-air anchors, 21 correspondents and reporters, and provides from than 120 hours of live programming each week.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC under the proposed spinoff.