Rachel Maddow was on the verge of being on the outside looking in, and it would have been her decision that put her there.
That was all before a pile of money was thrown her way last week. And perhaps more importantly, some flexibility and runway for growth that came with it.
The Daily Beast reported two weeks ago that Maddow was considering her options as she heads into the final year of her current contract with MSNBC. The Beast’s Lachlan Cartwright joined CNN’s Reliable Sources at that time to share his reporting on the possible breakup.
“This isn’t about the money for her, this is about a change in lifestyle,” Cartwright said about the motives of the whip-smart Maddow. “This is about a more balanced lifestyle. She’s had talks about starting her own thing that would involve podcasts and streaming and potentially newsletters.”
Cartwright currently reports that Maddow’s new deal is for $30 million per year, and includes a large downsizing of her workload. He says her nightly show will end in 2022, with her transitioning to weekly contributions through the 2024 election. The plan is for her weekly show to air for roughly 30 weeks out of the year.
A staunch liberal, Maddow studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and then began her media career at a small Massachusetts radio station before joining Air America, and later MSNBC.
Some believed that the public negotiations of recent weeks were simply a tactic to ramp up pressure on NBC to keep her. Even before the deal was struck, Cartwright’s knowledge of the situation told him otherwise.
“This is deadly serious. This wasn’t a plant from her representatives. In fact, I think they would have preferred if we didn’t write about it,” he told Brian Stelter a couple of weeks ago. “This isn’t a bargaining chip or a negotiating tactic. She is deadly serious about potentially leaving and that has NBC Universal scrambling. Their talks have become very heated, I’m told. And they’re going to have to throw a bucket load of cash at her and make some concessions on her workload if they want to keep her.”
In Cartwright’s accurate estimation, NBC was between a rock and a hard place. How could they possibly thrive in the years to come without their number one host?
“They have to keep her, Brian, because they have no succession planning, and without her it will be diabolical for MSNBC,” he said at the time.
Before the deal, TV Insider also added that Endeavor Co. president Mark Shapiro, who represents Maddow, felt “Rachel has an excellent relationship with them (NBC).”
Maddow began her MSNBC primetime program in 2008 and has since been the network’s premier personality. Just last month, her show averaged a robust 2.29 million viewers, and the news of a possible breakup has the television news industry abuzz.
“I was chasing this story, and my sense is the same as yours” Stelter concluded two weeks ago. “This was not an intentional leak by her side to try to get more money. This is something she’s really thinking about, and we’ll see if she does it.”
Some media insiders have said that no television personality represents a network’s brand more than Maddow does for MSNBC. That includes anyone on CNN or Fox News. NBC Universal apparently felt the same and backed up the truck to keep their number one star on the team.
It seems that Maddow and NBC have planned a thoughtful pullback in workload, with a boatload of cash to go with it. A deal that works well for everyone involved.
Rick Schultz is a former Sports Director for WFUV Radio at Fordham University. He has coached and mentored hundreds of Sports Broadcasting students at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, Marist College and privately. His media career experiences include working for the Hudson Valley Renegades, Army Sports at West Point, The Norwich Navigators, 1340/1390 ESPN Radio in Poughkeepsie, NY, Time Warner Cable TV, Scorephone NY, Metro Networks, NBC Sports, ABC Sports, Cumulus Media, Pamal Broadcasting and WATR. He has also authored a number of books including “A Renegade Championship Summer” and “Untold Tales From The Bush Leagues”. To get in touch, find him on Twitter @RickSchultzNY.
