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The Mayor of Weekends at MS NOW is entering the final days of her term.
No one elected Alex Witt to public office, but the MS NOW (and MSNBC) veteran has quietly held court on camera on Saturday and Sunday afternoons
— in various permutations and formats — for more than two decades. When colleague Alicia Melendez first came to the cable-news outlet, now part of Versant Media, she anchored a weekend slot and turned to Witt — to whom she gave the ersatz title — for advice, like how to get the makeup she wanted. Witt was able to leverage her Saturday and Sunday experience to help. “They’re going to hear you now,” Witt says she told her. “Just hang on.”
The Mayor is about to leave. After joining MSNBC in 1999, she will anchor her last program on September 6 — this Saturday — then fill in on various daytime hours through the rest of the year.
Ask the average MS NOW viewer which anchors work there, and chances are they’ll talk about Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell or Ari Melber. But Alex Witt, by dint of her longevity and her hunker-down-and-do-it style, is right up there, even if weekends aren’t seen as the glitziest time on the schedule. And yet, viewers tend to watch on weekends with fewer distractions and for longer periods of time. Director Aaron Sorkin would watch Witt regularly and email her for months before asking her to work as a consultant on his HBO series, “The Newsroom.” Actor Rami Malek once ran up to her at a festival to tell her he was an avid viewer.
“We deliver the same news as everyone else,” says Witt, during a recent visit at MS NOW’s New York headquarters, about working weekends.
Witt was anchoring on a weekend when the U.S. ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power earlier this year, and when Saddam Hussein in 2002 submitted an official declaration that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Over the years, says Witt, “there has been a lot on weekends.”
Her looming departure may be one of the last of its kind. Few people stick with cable news jobs for such a long period of time, and, as the economics of the business change, fewer still may be able to do so. At MS NOW, only correspondent Chris Jansing comes close to matching Witt’s staying power. At Fox News Channel, veteran Neal Cavuto is gone, with Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy among those who have stayed on the schedule since the network’s early years. Wolf Blitzer, Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Cooper are among the stalwarts at CNN.
Now there are fewer journalists with such a pedigree, and their number is likely to winnow further. Younger journalists have “all the different, shiny new objects and things” to ply their craft in new venues, says Witt, and the days of working for a single company for an entire career are largely gone. Will others match her durability in years to come? “I think it will be a very rare thing,” she says. “I don’t know that the likes of this comes along again.”
She attributes her longevity to a focus on delivering the news to the exclusion of many other things. Her Mayor title is purely ceremonial. “I’ve never played politics and never sought the limelight. I’m the strangest person ever to be on TV. I can’t do my makeup. Trust me, you will not recognize me if you pass me on the street,” she says. “I don’t care about that stuff. I just love the news.”
She also has longstanding ties with the people who make her show work behind the scenes. Witt has been paired with the same executive producer, Nick Kovijanic, for years. “He’s my right arm. We finish each other’s sentences,” says Witt, and the two bicker endlessly. “He’ll push the button and he’ll go, ‘Hey, Alex, here’s what we’re gonna do. And I’ll be like, ‘Shut up, get out of my ear. I know what we’re gonna do,” an exchange she equates to “Mom and Dad fighting again.” Kovijanic was supposed to retire in July, but Witt asked him if he would stay on for just a little longer, until her last full show. He agreed. She became a little emotional when speaking about him.
MS NOW may miss her. The network has made all sorts of programming and scheduling changes over the years on weekends, but few if any of them delivered better ratings than the hours Witt anchored, according to two people familiar with operations at predecessor MSNBC. Antonia One of these people says Witt has developed a “stickiness” with audiences that will be hard to emulate. Hylton will take over the weekend-news duties, which Witt sees as a coming-full-circle moment. Before Witt started working weekend hours on MSNBC, they were led by Soledad O’Brien, who is Hylton’s aunt.
When Witt left college, she never saw herself as someone who would be on camera. She worked as a producer at California stations like KCBS and KNBC, and made her way to a field producer role at NBC’s “Today.” Someone there advised her to look at on-camera jobs and Witt found a spot at KCBA, a northern-California station launched by husband-and-wife journalists.
When she got married and had a son, Witt decided to focus on motherhood. Her then-husband, also a journalist, got a job at CBS in New York and within a few years, she found herself watching reports about TWA Flight 800, the airplane that exploded after taking off from Kennedy International Airport in New York, and wanting to get back into the business. She landed a freelance job at Fox’s WNYW in New York and then a job anchoring overnights at MSNBC in 1999, thanks to a connection with Eric Sorenson, then the president, whom Witt had known at KCBS. During her time at the network, she has also anchored daytime shows with multiple anchors and even “Way Too Early,” the crack-of-dawn program that precedes “Morning Joe.”
“Every time I’ve switched positions, I just embrace the hours and go for it,” Witt says. But once she landed on weekends, she never let them go.
That put-your-head-down attitude has helped her do something she may never have intended. In a sector quickly going through wrenching change, Witt on weekends has dug a groove, becoming a cultural touchstone for her audience — something that can’t be done, at least not yet, with a start-up newsletter or a torrent of social-media likes. “Even in a world where digital is king and social media is the currency, she just did the news. And the audience loved her for it,” says one of the people familiar with MSNBC operations. “That was the key to her longevity.”
Witt likes to ask questions, but rarely puts herself in a position where she must answer a lot of them. She hasn’t done many of the glitzy magazine profiles that are de rigueur for TV-news anchors, and she doesn’t court much attention off camera. When she leaves MS NOW for good, she expects to return to her roots in California, where she might try her hand at writing a book, or teaching, or a bunch of other activities.
All she wanted to do, she says, is connect with a viewer at home. “I strive to do a really good job. Consistency, I know, helps. And I think I look at the camera lens like I’m talking to you. It’s one person. I’ve never thought about the numbers. When my parents were alive, it was my parents. I just wanted to talk to them,” says Witt. “And I don’t know, I guess it worked.”
