Jacob Soboroff says he was doing creator media before it was cool.
Some say the 43-year-old MS NOW correspondent has finally achieved success. The journalist, who has spent years reporting sometimes intense stories on the ground, including the treatment of people crossing the southern U.S. border and wildfires ravaging the Los Angeles area, will anchor his three-hour show, Connect, this Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
But for years, Soboroff has been telling her story one story at a time through a number of platforms, including decidedly non-traditional ones. And MS NOW is hoping perhaps that experience will help draw viewers to his new show. In the past few years, Soboroff has worked on a show called “YouTube Nation” and logged time as a contributor on MTV News and Huffington Post Live. He started making videos in hopes of going viral at a time when many people thought the phrase meant someone was feeling bad.
“I think that spirit is ingrained within me. I came from that culture,” Soboroff says of the dozens of video podcasts and newsletters that have recently launched. At another time, Mr. Soboroff noted how a young Anderson Cooper cut his teeth at a start-up called Channel One before joining ABC and CNN. “That was kind of a model for me,” Soboroff said in a recent interview. “It taught me that if you do something yourself, someone might see it. That’s exactly what happened to me.”
There could be more to come if he follows the traditional career path with MS NOW. Working weekends at MS NOW (formerly known as MSNBC) provided a path to high-profile weekday gigs. It has become widely known on TV that Chris Hayes and Joy Reid are working the weekend shift, and now longtime Saturday and Sunday host Ali Velshi will also take over as anchor of “The Eleventh Hour” as part of MS NOW’s schedule overhaul.
Soboroff is primarily focused on getting the show up and running, not where it could go in the next few years. “I’m taking my weekends one day at a time,” he says. “As someone who loves the atmosphere of weekends, I think weekends are going to be great. And if I can always do weekends, forever, forever, that’s a win.”
He will have a chance to make the program his own. “Connect” is the network’s first California-based show. For Soboroff, this is an opportunity to show his audience what he knows about his hometown, but it’s also an opportunity for MS NOW to highlight a state that is playing an increasingly larger role in national politics. In fact, Fox News Channel and CNN both have programs based in California. “Fox News @ Night,” anchored by Trace Gallagher, gives Fox News the opportunity to provide West Coast viewers with tailored programming at the end of the scheduled day. CNN’s “The Story Is…,” starring Erex Michaelson, provides news into the early morning hours at the Warner Bros. Discovery Outlet, with anchors hosting the show in prime time in California.
“This place is as much a part of me as any other place,” Soboroff said, noting that covering the West Coast played a role “in my growth as a journalist and how people relate to me.” And although he covers national and international stories, he is definitely aware of his surroundings. “This job has taken me all over the world, but I always end up coming back to Los Angeles,” he says.
Making the program unique to Soboroff means harnessing some of the kinetic energy that typically appears when he covers a story. Soboroff’s work often ventures off the traditional screen and onto social media, providing viewers with more details than can be crammed into traditional segments.
He comes out from behind the desk. “I try to get out of the studio in some way at least once a week,” he says, adding, “I’m most comfortable with a stick microphone in my hand and handing it to someone else to talk about something.”
MS NOW will use “Connect” to spotlight its partnership with The Marshall Project, whose collaboration examining how the number of infants and young children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has increased under President Trump’s second term will appear on his show. Soboroff spoke with families whose children have been detained, as well as child welfare, health and immigration detention experts.
The journalist also wants to fill the three hours with other types of reporting. “We’ll be able to talk about culture,” he says, examining the documentary.
Soboroff didn’t originally want to be a reporter. In fact, in some of his early jobs, he worked on advance teams for politicians like Michael Bloomberg and Howard Dean. While attending New York University, Soboroff spent much of his time pursuing a theater major.
But he couldn’t take his eyes off what was happening on YouTube. He became fascinated with the medium’s potential after realizing that Sen. George Allen’s 2006 campaign was derailed after he referred to Indian student volunteers as “makakas.” “That was the moment when politics was born on YouTube,” Soboroff said. And he started doing video interviews of himself, working with an organization called Why Tuesday, which seeks to move U.S. elections to the weekend so more people can vote more easily. “The video went viral,” he recalls. “It was my first time on MSNBC. It was my first time on cable news. I did interviews here and there,” and people took notice of him.
“Connect” has digital viewing in mind. “It’s very important to me that everything we do while producing this broadcast linear TV show is as digital as possible,” Soboroff said. “And it’s not a revolutionary thing. But I understand that and that’s how I operate every day. I’m sitting here running my social channels.”
Even the show’s theme music is personal to Soboroff. He is an old friend of songwriter Sean Douglas, who has written songs for Lizzo and Demi Lovato. He and Soboroff have known each other since they were 6 years old. Soboroff said Douglas helped create “the sonic identity of the show, similar to what you hear when you’re watching a nightly newscast.” “You’ll know you’re looking at Connect.”
Soboroff wants to start working and wants to spend time on this latest phase of his career. “I’ve never believed in riding the express train in a professional sense.”
