Meet The Press is going online. Chuck Todd – who has moderated Meet The Press, the long-running Sunday news program, since 2014 – will take Meet The Press Daily from its home on MSNBC to NBC News NOW, the network’s streaming service. MTP Daily will be rebranded as Meet The Press Now. MSNBC will hand off the 1 pm ET timeslot to Chris Jansing and MSNBC Reports. The shift is set for May 26.
“NBC News is the leader in streaming news,” NBC News President Noah Oppenheim said in a statement. “Since our launch, we’ve been committed to delivering the best of NBC News’ journalism, free, to streaming audiences everywhere. Chuck was one of the first broadcast anchors to see the massive potential of streaming, and bringing Meet the Press’s daily franchise to NBC News NOW reinforces the platform’s status as the destination for news on streaming.”
Chris looks to dethrone Fox News’ America Reports in that timeslot. Deadline reports it draws an average of 1.6 million over its two-hour timeslot, while CNN Newsroom with Ana Cabrera pulls in 776k viewers. As Chris preps for this new venture, here’s what you need to know.
Chris Jansing Is A Veteran Journalist
NBC News gave a brief bio about Chris when announcing her arrival in the 1 pm ET slot:
“Chris Jansing, who has been with MSNBC for 20 years, has served as anchor, Senior White House Correspondent, and covered 11 presidential campaigns beginning with the 1980 convention. She has reported on some of the biggest breaking news stories of our time, including the September 11th terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the shooting tragedies in Tucson and Aurora, Colo.”
She Is The Youngest Of 12 Children
Chris was born in Ohio on Jan. 30, 1957. Her father was a factory worker, and her mother was a baker. They welcomed twelve children into the world – seven boys, five girls – and Chris is the youngest. Bathroom time “was horrible,” Chris said in 2013. “You had to fend for yourself.” In 1978, she graduated from Otterbein College with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism.
She’s An Emmy Award-Winner
Chris joined NBC News in June 1998. Before joining the NBC News team, she co-anchored the nightly news for WNYT-TV Albany – where she was honored with numerous awards for excellence in journalism, including two Emmys, according to NBC News. She earned one of those Emmys for covering the 1996 Olympic Park bombing during the Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia.
Hello neighbor! And thank you to the coolest icon in news… https://t.co/5GledNhQxr
— Chris Jansing (@ChrisJansing) May 6, 2022
Chris’s Family Struggled With COVID
“My first experience was back in late July when my Aunt Margie in Florida died of COVID in a hospital there, and I said goodbye on FaceTime,” Chris said during a Jan. 2021 appearance on NBC News Now. “Last month, my brother Jim, who is special needs, was hospitalized for six days. Fortunately, he recovered, but he does not like to be alone, and isolation for these patients remains one of the horrors, absolute horrors, of this disease.” Chris also said that her sister, Janice, was rushed to the hospital, where she spent several days on a ventilator.
“Finally, when they were able to get her to breathe on her own, the first thing the doctor told us she said was ‘I’ve been to hell and back,’” said Chris.
She’s Of Hungarian & Slovak Descent.
Chris’s last name comes from her marriage to Robert Jansing. She was known as Chris Kapostasy when she worked as a reporter and anchor at WNYT NewsChannel 13 in the Capital Region, according to the Times Union. Though Chris and Robert are no longer together, she has retained his last name.