Brandy Zadrozny moves from NBC News to MSNBC as the network’s post-Comcast newsroom takes shape

Versant, the new company that’s being spun off from Comcast, and which will be the new home to several of its cable networks, is building out a new, independent news-gathering operation as it disentangles MSNBC from NBC News.

For decades, the two brands worked hand-in-hand, sharing reporting and resources. However, with the two entities soon to be part of different companies, they need to decouple, which includes determining where some of the company’s talent will go.

That’s a complicated process, and it means that MSNBC, for the first time since its inception in 1996, will rely on its own stable of reporters and correspondents, rather than the combined efforts of its staff and NBC News. 

And right out of the gate, the news is good for MSNBC, as it has managed to bring aboard one of NBC News’s most prominent journalists. 

Brandy Zadrozny is joining MSNBC as the network’s new senior enterprise reporter, based in New York. She moves to the new role after serving as a senior reporter at NBC News, where she covered the internet with a focus on politics, tech, and extremism.

Zadrozny’s work won her an Emmy, a Webby Award for a six-episode NBC News podcast she created, and includes stories related to radicalization, vaccine skepticism, and QAnon.

“I’m thrilled to be joining MSNBC after years of reporting alongside its journalists,” Zadrozny tells Fast Company. “At a moment when there’s real hunger for fact-based journalism with a clear mission, I’m grateful for the opportunity to keep investigating stories that matter—about disinformation and the fringe forces reshaping our politics—with the support and reach of a network that knows exactly what it stands for.”

Filling out the ranks

Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp. announced in late 2024 that it would spin out its cable TV networks, including USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Golf Channel, into a separate publicly traded company, initially dubbed “SpinCo,” which it said at the time had generated $7 billion in 2024.

The company name was revealed as Versant in May, with the spin-off expected to be completed later this year. Shares of Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) are down roughly 3% since the announcement.

Zadrozny is one of several key hires that MSNBC is making, bringing in talent with diverse media backgrounds, including alumni of the Wall Street Journal, Politico, CNN, and even the upstart Crooked Media. 

That includes Scott Matthews, who will be MSNBC’s senior vice president of news-gathering, along with NBC News’s Joey Cole and ABC News’s Erin Zimmerman, who will be in charge of day-to-day and long-term planning for the news team.

Sudeep Reddy, formerly of Politico, is the network’s new Washington bureau chief, and Madeleine Haeringer, formerly of NBC News and Crooked Media, is the new head of digital, audio, and long-form operations.

In addition, Vaughn Hillyard will be the network’s senior White House correspondent, and Laura Barrón-López (a former White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour) will be MSNBC’s White House correspondent. David Noriega will be a correspondent based in Los Angeles, and Marc Santia will be an Investigative Correspondent.

But that’s not all: MSNBC is also welcoming a batch of correspondents and contributors, including Eugene Daniels, Jackie Alemany, Antonia Hylton, Elise Jordan, Ken Dilanian, and Erielle Reshef.

Programming shifts

There will also be some programming shakeups. That includes Jen Psaki’s show airing at 9 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday, with Rachel Maddow holding down the slot on Monday nights. Ali Velshi’s program is being supersized to three hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

It’s expected that MSNBC will be fully independent from NBC News within a few months, and that the full spin-off of Versant from NBCUniversal and Comcast will occur by the end of the year.

Versant’s properties will reach 70 million households in the United States.

In the meantime, MSNBC and NBC News will continue the work of separating. Notably, both MSNBC and CNBC will retain their names, despite no longer being affiliated with NBC—much in the same way that MSNBC has kept “MS” as a part of its branding, despite no longer being affiliated with Microsoft, which helped launch the brand in the 1990s.

(Disclosure: The author of this story previously worked for CNBC.)