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On Thursday’s broadcast of her MS NOW program, “Money Power Politics,” anchor Stephanie Ruhle saved the hardest question for last.
The host’s mother, Louise, part of a live studio audience that had been convened for
the show, let loose with a scathing series of queries about the future of the U.S. “The country’s definitely going sideways,” said Ruhle’s mother, who proved to be as garrulous as her daughter. “And it didn’t just start yesterday.” She raised issues of health insurance, polarized political parties and “I.A.,” by which she meant A.I.
The fusillade impressed one of Ruhle’s on-set guests, Democratic party stalwart Rahm Emannuel. “I just learned a lot about you,” he said to the anchor.
Soon, so too will MS NOW viewers. The Versant Media-backed news outlet intends to dispatch a growing number of its on-screen personnelto interact with live crowds— sometimes in studio and occasionally as part of events, but also as part of a new subscription app that hinges on unscripted twice-daily conversations between users and MS NOW anchors and correspondents. The way Ruhle responded to the crowd gathered Thursday in an Englewood Cliffs, N.J., studio that is part of its Versant sibling CNBC, could serve as an indicator of what’s to come.
“When we are only in the TV-presenter business, you miss — you are racing past the fundamentals that people really want to know about,” said Ruhle, during an interview following the program. If the anchor has her way, she says, she’d be able to do a linear telecast with an in-studio crowd more frequently. “I would love to do this every day,” says Ruhle, who acknowledges “once a week” is probably a more realistic goal.
MS NOW’s new “Membership” subscription calls for Ruhle and colleague Ali Velshi to hold a live session with subscribers once per week. Others such as Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaski will also take part in different sessions, as will the broader group of hosts at “Morning Joe.” MS NOW, which still makes the bulk of its revenue from TV operations, is placing new emphasis on a series of live convocations between its audience and its best-known on-air staff. The next one takes place later this week in Dallas and Arlington — not an area of the country known for the blue-state politics usually espoused during MS NOW’s primetime lineup.
Response to the chance to interact online with anchors has been encouraging, says Marcus Mabry, MS NOW’s senior vice president for content strategy. “It has been so rewarding to see so many of our members already actively participating in two-way conversations, both with our journalists and each other,” he says via email. “We will continue to make that connection even stronger, with more opportunities to be together in person with the MS NOW community.”
Putting anchors and audiences in regular contact is a noble goal, but also one that can be hard to maintain. Several TV-news organizations have mounted formats with in-studio audiences in the mix. Sean Hannity in 2023 started doing a few live broadcasts with a small crowd of about two dozen at Fox News Channel’s New York headquarters. Chris Hayes tried his hand at a Friday-night show done in front of a large, live crowd in Studio 6A at NBCUniversal’s New York center before MS NOW was spun off from NBC. NBC News was eager to place Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager in front of a live studio audience before the coronavirus pandemic got in the way.
Pressure is growing to get it right. Younger viewers who might in the past have gravitated to traditional news are showing more interest in independent journalists and pundits who use digital media to gain traction. Looser formats and more chances for audience interaction from outlets like MS NOW could attract some of the crowdsthat might otherwise stick with newsletters and video podcasts.
For Ruhle, live interaction marks the latest non-traditional effort from a TV anchor who has a decidedly non-traditional background. Ruhle got her start in banking, selling credit derivatives, among other products, during stints at Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank. She made her way to Bloomberg, where she launched a career covering Wall Street and anchoring programs about it. On MS NOW, she has burnished a kinetic style, one that has her sometimes lean physically one way or the other or push toward the camera to deliver remarks. And she has taken part in unorthodox formats before, such as a weekend show that she co-hosted with Ali Velshi.
She knows working with a live crowd will likely require a more “freewheeling” demeanor and may mean she has to interrupt someone to keep the program on track. Such a format may also work to her advantage, says Rhule, who reveals that she is “extremely dyslexic” and does not work with a news teleprompter in the same way as many of her colleagues. “No one is tapping me to replace Tom Llamas,” she jokes, nodding to the anchor of “NBC Nightly News.”
A new live-interaction format may do some things that are more serious. Ruhle thinks bringing people together is more critical than it may have been in the past. The current tone of the news cycle has people feeling “scared and vulnerable,” she notes, and journalism companies can do more to inform and establish a common ground of facts.
“Going viral is making us sicker,” she quips, referring to news clips that often gain traction for rhetorical flourishes or on-screen conflict. She thinks there are new opportunities to “create more and more live engagement, questions and answers, not create fights on TV or a soundbite that goes around the world.” Getting traction for such stuff is “a longer game,” she acknowledges, but “I’m working on it.”
