Kendis Gibson will start as a weekend anchor on MSNBC after a stint at ABC News, the latest hire by the NBCUniversal cable-news network as it continues to emphasize live news programming on Saturdays and Sundays.
He starts his new job on Saturday, January 19.
Gibson, who joined ABC News in 2014, had been an anchor of “World News Now” and “America This Morning,” an early-morning program. He is expected to anchor the 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. hours on MSNBC on both Saturdays and Sundays.
He has experience at both national news outlets and big-city stations. He has worked for CBS News’ Newspath; for CNN and its sister network, HLN; and for Washington D.C.’s WJLA, among others. At ABC, he was the first network correspondent at the Santa Barbara oil spill; reported on the FIFA scandal in Switzerland, and covered the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in South Carolina.
MSNBC in late 2017 began to extend live news broadcasts during weekends, rather than relying on taped broadcasts of “Lockup,” a documentary-style program about life in jail. The network’s overall weekend viewership rose 7% in 2018, with an average of 558,000 total viewers during weekend total day. CNN continues to snare more audience among weekend viewers between 25 and 54, the demographic most coveted by advertisers in news programming.