MSNBC President Laments Difficult Year for Cable News, Plans Broader Focus

In his annual end of the year memo, MSNBC president Phil Griffin detailed the challenges at MSNBC - which, along with the rest of the news industry, saw a seismic shift of viewers from traditional TV to digital - and promised major changes for next year.

It's no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for MSNBC, said Griffin in the memo to staff, which was obtained by B&C. Technology is continuing to drive unprecedented changes across the media landscape - and we all should be taking a hard, honest look at how we need to evolve along with it.

MSNBC is on track to deliver its lowest primetime ratings (Monday-Friday) since 2006 among the adults 25-54 news demo and lowest in total viewers since 2007. Full year-end ratings will be available on Tuesday, but through Dec. 10, MSNBC has averaged 170,000 viewers in the demo and 592,000 total viewers. However, MSNBC still ranks second behind Fox News among total viewers, though CNN has chipped away all year.

MSNBC was also not alone in seeing year-over-year decreases. Through Dec. 10, all three cable news networks were down in nearly every measure.

MSNBC has already signaled a move towards a larger digital presence, launching its Shift by MSNBC online video hub earlier this month.

We're going to get on the road - and outside of Washington - a lot more. We're going to keep opening up our aperture, while investing in original reporting on the broad range of stories that move and inspire Americans, continued Griffin. And we're going to use new technologies, events and creative tools to engage and mobilize our passionate audience.

Griffin's full memo is below:

Team,

As we get ready to ring in 2015, I wanted to share my thoughts on the past year and the great opportunities that lie ahead for us.

It's no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for msnbc. Technology is continuing to drive unprecedented changes across the media landscape - and we all should be taking a hard, honest look at how we need to evolve along with it.

But these changes and challenges are a good thing for news consumers and for msnbc. They will push us harder to innovate and create fresh content that will appeal to our current audience and attract new ones. They will drive us to continuously seek out exciting talent, with different areas of expertise and perspectives. And they remind us to stay true to what we do best: covering the issues that matter to all Americans, advancing the conversation, and finding the stories that celebrate the unique spirit and strengths of our country.

Now, this kind of growth won't happen overnight and in many ways 2014 became a critical learning and investment period for us. That's an important thing - we got a chance to see what worked well, what didn't, and absorb it. And I'm very proud of our entire team, and how we navigated these larger, tough dynamics. Thanks to your tireless work, we are finishing the year in a much stronger position than many might have expected:

For the fifth consecutive year we are the number two cable network in prime for total viewers, and on a weekly basis, audiences are continuing to choose our hallmark programs, including Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show, over CNN. Were going to keep striving to improve on these numbers by every measure.

Since launching our digital home just over a year ago, msnbc.com has seen tremendous growth. To date, our total views have grown by 94 percent. Our unique visitors have grown by 288 percent, and at a time when everyone is more distracted than ever, our audience wants to spend more time with us - our average videos watched per visit has grown 52 percent.

We continue to have the most diverse audience in cable television and were the only network to see our Hispanic audience increase over the past year. In fact, in 2014 msnbc become the top-rated cable network for Hispanic viewers 25-54 during Monday-Fridayprimetime - growth that is especially crucial as we gear up for the next presidential election. For the fifth consecutive year, we were the number one cable network for African-Americans in demo and total viewers. Our African-American audience is double that of CNN's and more than seven times that of Fox News.

In just the past few months alone, we've taken bold steps to become a more integrated and nimble organization by launching the Bridge, which is already dramatically improving our ability to drive content across all platforms, and Shift, our new venture into digital programming that is already allowing us to reach new, younger audiences on a wide range of topics and experiment.

We broke new ground by launching a multi-platform partnership with the Global Citizen campaign, showing whats possible when we team up with an organization like the Global Poverty Project to shine a light on causes that are important to the msnbc community and empower them to make a difference. Together, we created new original reporting and content, which included special in-depth reports from the field and interviews with celebrities active in work to end poverty, and produced the first live broadcast of the Global Citizen Festival concert in Central Park. This first venture proved to be a very successful model for combining inventive programming, events, and sponsorships to raise awareness for causes that reflect our audiences values and were going to expand on it moving forward.

We have a long history of finding and nurturing great talent - and with an eye toward 2016 - we continued to build our next generation of top-notch journalists, across all platforms. In just over a month into his new show, Jose-Diaz-Balart is already getting recognized as