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At around 4am on the morning of Saturday, September 19, Jacob Soboroff, a host on MS Now, was preparing to head to Los Angeles’s Studio City when he received an urgent call from Niamh Cagney, one of his producers in New York. “She didn’t get in,” Cagney said, of Akayla Gardner, the MS Now White House correspondent. “So we’re going to blow up the show.” On Truth Social the day before, Donald Trump declared that MS Now, CNN, and Politico were banned from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” Apparently, he was serious. As Soboroff grabbed his jacket and made for his car, he scrambled to text Gardner as his producers rushed to secure new guests. “By the time I got to the studio,” Soboroff told me, “we had a pretty good plan.”
When MSNBC split from NBC last fall, and became MS Now, Rebecca Kutler, the network’s president, sought Soboroff out. Soboroff—who is forty-three, with acrylic black glasses and tousled brown hair—had become one of the most recognizable correspondents on TV, synonymous with MSNBC and NBC News’s on-the-ground reporting on immigration and protests. In 2019, he’d won a Walter Cronkite Award for gaining access to a facility in Texas holding fourteen hundred children who had been separated from their parents. He was also among the first national journalists on the scene during the 2025 wildfires that tore across Los Angeles, destroying eighteen thousand structures—including Soboroff’s childhood home, in Pacific Palisades. Kutler, though, wanted Soboroff in the studio. “If it was going to be a Ron Burgundy situation where I was going to be asked to step into somebody else’s gig, put on a suit every night and cut my hair and not be myself, I would have been hesitant,” he told me. “But she sat me down and said, ‘I want you to bring the ethos of what you do in the field into the studio.’” Kutler let Soboroff stay in LA, and built him a studio—the network’s first in California.
This summer, Soboroff and his team—about twenty-five producers, split between New York and LA—debuted Connect with Jacob Soboroff, a three-hour TV newsmagazine that runs on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The show’s mixture of field segments and serious-minded interviews reflects MS Now’s commitment to original reporting as a fully independent network. (Previously, MSNBC reportedly spent sixty million dollars a year to share the news gathered by NBC.) For good measure, Soboroff also hosts lighthearted panels with comedians, writers, and other Angeleno creatives. For MSNBC diehards, accustomed to liberal opinion and analysis and a steady succession of Democratic Party talking heads—for most of its history, MSNBC didn’t even have a White House correspondent—Connect is a brave new world. Yet the changeup appears to be working. After the show started, in June, it averaged more than a half million viewers in its first few weeks, helping push overall weekend viewership up 23 percent from the year before. By September it was beating CNN in the time slot. Just as important, Connect segments often garner hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, helping the network generate more views on the platform than ABC, NBC, and CBS combined (though CNN and Fox News remain far ahead of MS Now in terms of YouTube subscribers).
The transformation hasn’t been limited to the weekend. The network is investing millions of dollars into its newsgathering division, hiring more than three dozen reporters and hundreds of producers, editors, and other support staff just as competitors, including CNN, are cutting costs. (A spokesperson for MS Now declined to provide details on the newsgathering budget.) That is still a fraction of the size of NBC News—which has around two thousand employees—but a year in, MS Now has landed big stories. In August, Rosa Flores, a national reporter, obtained surveillance video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Houston pursuing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo immediately before he was shot and killed. Around the same time, Priya Sridhar, a Pentagon correspondent, exposed the atrocious conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier on a record-setting deployment to the Persian Gulf. Carol Leonnig, a five-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and Ken Dilanian reported on an investigation to identify and prosecute the anonymous sources for a story in The Atlantic about Kash Patel, the director of the FBI. The Trump administration, responding to a lawsuit brought by MS Now, CNN, and Politico to restore access to the White House, cited Leonnig and Dilanian’s article as one of several stories that had “threatened national security and spread falsehoods.” (There have also been missteps: last weekend, the network was forced to issue a correction after Dilanian erroneously reported that Patel had flown to Russia.)
On the day of the ban, Connect kicked off coverage with a live report from Gardner outside the gates of the White House and a remote interview with Jim Acosta, the former CNN anchor who had his White House credentials revoked during the first Trump administration. To round out the show, Soboroff stuck with two previously arranged segments. The first featured Salman Rushdie, an authoritative voice on freedom of expression. The other focused on Yanqi Xu, an investigative journalist who revealed the extensive use of undocumented labor on hog farms owned by Jim Pillen, Nebraska’s anti-immigrant governor. In response to the reporting, Pillen suggested that Xu was operating on behalf of the Chinese government. Taken together—and considering other recent guests, such as Izzy Ramirez of LA Taco and ProPublica’s Nicole Santa Cruz—Connect struck me as atypical fare for a national cable news program. For Soboroff, that’s the point. Of Xu, he told me, “It was sort of a perfect story to tell.” He described Pillen’s effort to demonize Xu for her reporting as “a mirror image” of attacks on press freedom in Washington.
“I really think we get to go deeper, in a way, than the traditional shape of cable news,” he told me, even if he’s working in a medium built around ad breaks and compressed conversations. “It’s fast-paced,” Soboroff said. “But I haven’t done the pundit thing. I’d rather talk about stuff with people who have been there or have skin in the game.”
Soboroff likes to keep the Connect studio chilly—he says it keeps him sharp—so much so that the camera operators and producers wear puffer jackets. During commercial breaks, he chews on Altoids as he consults with his New York production team through an earpiece and checks social media. When I visited, he interviewed Kelly Lytle Hernández, a historian at UCLA, about the Trump administration’s targeting of green-card applicants, a wide-ranging conversation that delved into the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the treatment of Haitian migrants in the seventies. Next, Soboroff spoke with a Texas woman whose niece died from pregnancy complications, and noted the state laws that threaten clinicians who provide abortion care with life in prison. What was unusual, by cable television standards, was that both segments ran for more than ten minutes.
Working at this length allows Soboroff to render narratives. “Newsmagazines, as pioneered by 60 Minutes, are principally about storytelling,” Charles Ponce de Leon, a media historian at California State University, Long Beach, told me. “You can make people aware of the significance of the story and the stakes.” Most cable news, he said, feels open-ended, devoid of any drama or resolution. Viewers often feel trapped in the middle of a perpetually unfolding story, the word “BREAKING” holding fast in the chyron regardless of the subject.
MS Now’s emphasis on the alternative paid off in January, when Alex Tabet, a field reporter, was one of the first national TV news journalists on the ground in Minneapolis when Renee Good was killed by ICE officers. Tabet had spent the past month in the Twin Cities, cultivating sources. “While I was watching the rest of these networks parachute in,” he told me, “we were a step ahead.” He appreciated that, at MS Now, “they will give you the leeway and the grace to do the reporting even before it becomes prevalent in the news cycle.”
That coverage is enabled by an integration of print and digital reporting with the broadcast. Sudeep Reddy, a Wall Street Journal and Politico veteran, now leads MS Now’s Washington bureau. “We were looking for some people who had some television DNA, some people who had print DNA, some people with online-only DNA,” Reddy told me. “Then we put all of them together to build out this new era.”
Connect, in particular, has been designed as a cross-platform newsmagazine for the twenty-first century. And there’s a real opportunity there: CNN is pulling back, and the reinvention of 60 Minutes under Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief, is floundering. “It doesn’t surprise me that cable news broadcasters wanting to remain relevant are embracing the newsmagazine format,” said Ponce de Leon, since it makes for a more engaging program that both “satisfies expectations while remaining unpredictable from broadcast to broadcast.”
Even so, Davidson Goldin, a media consultant who oversaw breaking news at MSNBC in the 2000s, draws a bright line between what works for networks and what works on cable. “The audience is completely different,” he told me. “With the nightly news, you’re making the choice to watch a show and find out what happened earlier that day. You turn on cable news to find out what’s happening now.” He thinks network newsmagazines like 60 Minutes or ABC’s 20/20 have only been able to survive because of their long-tenured audiences. Starting a newsmagazine from scratch on a cable network that viewers don’t necessarily associate with appointment viewing? That’s a tall order.
To his point, not every segment on Connect lands. Take “Prediction Markets,” a recurring feature in which Soboroff visits farmers markets and food halls to talk with shoppers about the week’s biggest stories, followed by a freewheeling chat with comedians and media personalities about the same topics. The day I visited, Soboroff found some college film majors and a PE teacher to discuss Trump’s efforts to stop mail-in voting. Then he booked Dave Holmes, an editor-at-large at Esquire, and Sabrina Jalees, a comedian, to join him in the studio and react to the market discourse. Holmes joked about focaccia; Jalees extemporized on the joy of free samples. Seeking to wrestle the conversation back to the weekend’s top story—the Trump administration’s effort to block MS Now from the White House—Soboroff segued awkwardly. “If you wanted ‘on the rails,’ you should not have put me on the news!” Jalees joked. Soboroff leapt in: “You’re welcome here anytime. Which I guess is not true of most journalists at the White House these days. I wonder what you make, Sabrina, of the most recent developments this week?”
After signing off, Soboroff retired to his office overlooking the Hollywood Hills. He sent a text to his wife about meeting for bagels—he never eats before filming, so he was starving. “Three hours is definitely a long time to be on TV,” he said, setting his glasses on the desk so he could wipe makeup off his face. “But every show, I’m like, ‘Whoa, that went by so fast.’”
MSNBC’s ratings were always highest when Republicans were in power and sagged without a clear antagonist in the Oval Office. Today, aggressive reporting from MS Now’s newsgathering provides grist for the progressive opinionators—Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Hayes, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski—who still dominate the network’s weekday lineup. Over the past three months, MS Now has been the number two network on cable, behind only Fox News. Maddow’s show has even managed to beat Sean Hannity in their time slot in recent weeks.
Even amid the early success of the newsgathering division, MS Now isn’t shedding its old identity as a bastion of liberal values. In September, the network started selling a membership program for $7.99 a month, monetizing its political identity by connecting viewers with hosts such as Maddow and Jen Psaki. In livestreamed Q&As, individual viewers take turns rotating onscreen to chat with an anchor. “I’m psyched for this platform,” Maddow told a viewer in one of her first appearances. “It’s our human-level safety net against political forces that want to dehumanize us.”
Soboroff told me that he’s conscious of how the Democratic Party’s anticipated resurgence this fall will force MS Now to do more than just beat up on Republicans. “I work here because of the people, not the politics,” he said. “I went to Haiti during the Biden administration to look at how he was continuing some of the policies of Trump when it came to immigration. I’ve been super tough on Gavin Newsom about how we live in the most unaffordable city in the most unaffordable state in the country.… Last night, I saw on TMZ he was out at Nobu Malibu with De Niro and Tobey Maguire and—who was the other one? DiCaprio. If he’s going to run for president, he’s got to answer some serious questions.”
In Soboroff, the network has found a younger star poised to help lead it into an era that puts reporting ahead of punditry. “This is a show about people,” as he told me. That’s why he called it Connect. “No matter the administration, that’ll still be the goal.”
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