The president of MSNBC, Rashida Jones, is stepping down from that position, the company said on Tuesday, a major change at the news network just days before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office.
Rebecca Kutler, senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC, will succeed Ms. Jones as interim president, effective immediately. Ms. Jones will stay on in an advisory role through March.
“Rebecca is the ideal leader to guide us through this moment, and I look forward to collaborating with her as we shape our collective future together,” Mark Lazarus, the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, said in a note to staffers.
Ms. Jones’s exit comes amid industrywide pressure for the cable news industry, which has seen declining ratings after the U.S. presidential election. MSNBC has been the second most-watched cable network during that period, ahead of CNN but behind longtime ratings leader Fox News.
Executives at the network are hopeful that audiences will return as Mr. Trump takes office and viewers seek to dissect his early policy moves. On Monday, the company announced that Rachel Maddow, its most popular host, would temporarily return to broadcasting her one-hour show every weeknight at 9 p.m. Eastern for Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office.
MSNBC is among a bundle of cable channels that its parent company, Comcast, is planning to spin out later this year into a new company. CNBC, another news channel in Comcast’s cable portfolio, is also being spun out, along with entertainment networks like USA and Syfy.
On a call with MSNBC employees earlier Tuesday, Mr. Lazarus said that the company would be hiring a new head of news gathering and a head of talent. MSNBC will retain its name after the spinoff, Mr. Lazarus said.
During that call, Ms. Maddow said that Ms. Jones served as a “heat shield” that protected MSNBC’s anchors from pressure that would otherwise be brought down on them.
“Other companies don’t run that way, and it is because you’ve been insistent that we treat each other respectfully and that you’ll be the one who takes the outside heat,” Ms. Maddow said.
Ms. Jones rose through the ranks of MSNBC over more than a decade at the network, where she previously oversaw daytime and weekend news programming. Ms. Jones got her start in local television news, working as a morning show producer at WTKR in Norfolk, Va.
During Ms. Jones’s tenure, MSNBC made several big changes to its lineup, appointing Alex Wagner to succeed Ms. Maddow as host of its 9 p.m. hour four days a week and extending “Morning Joe,” its flagship morning chat show, to a fourth hour. There were also some high-profile departures, including Mehdi Hasan, the former anchor of a Sunday night show that was canceled.
Ms. Kutler is a cable news executive with experience in the streaming business. Before joining MSNBC in 2022, Ms. Kutler was a key architect of CNN+, the ambitious streaming news service that was shut down by Warner Bros. Discovery that year.
