• by Wayne Friedman , 4 hours ago

Longtime NBC news channel MSNBC will change its name later this year, with its coming separation from Comcast’s NBCUniversal.

The new brand name will be MS NOW (My Source News Opinion World), according to an internal memo sent to employees by Mark Lazarus, chief executive officer of Versant, a new company that will start up to house the spinoff NBC cable TV networks.

This will be accompanied by a new national marketing campaign in the coming weeks, where the brand separation will also lose the NBC News "peacock' brand logo.

Versant is looking to spin off as a publicly traded company before the end of the year.

Originally Lazarus said MSNBC wouldn’t need to change its name. But in keeping with the “need to accelerate the distinction between MSNBC and NBC News organizations” the move is being made, according to the Lazarus memo.

In recent months, MSNBC has been ramping up hiring of about 100 new employees to supplement its cable TV network separation from NBC News.

Sister cable network CNBC, the cable business channel, will not change its name, according to a report in CNBC. The thinking behind this was that CNBC doesn’t carry the same association as that of MSNBC. CNBC was created around the brand name ‘Consumer News and Business Channel.

MSNBC started up in 1996 as a joint venture of NBC New and Microsoft.

When Microsoft divested itself from its equity stake in the network back in 2005, a name change had been considered -- especially because of the "MS” reference alluding to Microsoft. But it was considered too much a part of the overall news network brand by then to make the shift.