MS NOW becomes high-profile user of ‘.now’ domain extension

In addition to new studios, graphics and a name, the cable network formerly known as MSNBC also moved its digital home to a new address.

The network, which has used the domain msnbc.com since its founding in 1996, began redirecting visitors to a different domain — ms.now, on Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025, to reflect its new name, MS NOW.

What is ‘.now’?

For those not familiar with domain extensions beyond the traditional .com, .org and .net, .now is one of dozens of newer generic top-level domains that began rolling out in November 2013 by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the standards organization that oversees the domain name system.

Companies, including MSNBC’s former parent, were able to secure custom extensions such as .nbc and largely use or plan to use them for their own official sites (for example, ABC News owns the .abc extension and uses gma.abc as a URL shortener for its “Good Morning America” franchise).

Multiple companies, including some backed by other big names in tech, also sprang up to capitalize on the opportunity to create new domain name spaces in hopes of providing an alternative to the ever-shrinking pool of available domains under the historic extensions.

This included .now, which is owned by Amazon Registry Services, which is part of the ecommerce and tech company Amazon. Under these scenarios, Amazon has the rights to charge individuals and companies registration fees, typically on a year-to-year basis, who want to use their domain extension.

Although it’s not clear if MS NOW ran into uses securing the rights to “msnow.com,” which is registered and shows a “for sale” page that appears to suggest the domain is meant to stand for “Motorized Snow Vehicles.”

So, the network opted to use the .now extension.

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Although the use of the “new” extensions has been growing in popularity, there’s still a good portion of the population that isn’t as familiar with the idea, which could spark at least some confusion about how to visit the network’s site.

That said, MS NOW has been billing itself as the “newsroom of the future” and, like most linear networks, is likely keen to attract younger, more tech savvy audiences, so ms.now is a solid choice.

Social media handles

MS NOW has apparently been unable, as of yet, to secure the handle “@msnow” on many major social media platforms.

Instead, it’s using “@msnownews” for its general headlines-based account. Select individual shows also maintain separate accounts using variations of their names.

It did manage to secure “@msnow_reports” for its rolling dayside hours of news coverage.

While MS NOW’s parent, Versant, still appears to control the old msnbc.com, most URLs, such as msnbc.com/schedule, are being redirected to the new domain. 

History of msnbc.com

The semi-retirement of msnbc.com marks a significant step for the network. Back when MSNBC was launched with then-partner Microsoft as a tech-focused, interactive news network, NBC News began using the domain as its official home (the network has long owned nbcnews.com and for a period, typing in nbcnews.com would redirect to msnbc.com).

There was also a period when both NBC News and MSNBC shows would use subdomains under msnbc.com, such as nightlynews.msnbc.com.

After Microsoft exited the partnership, NBC began moving away from using the msnbc.com domain and subdomains, eventually switching back to nbcnews.com.

Meanwhile, msnbc.com evolved into a site specifically for the network, offering news coverage, analysis, opinion and show-related content.

New site design and fonts

The new ms.now site retains the same general feel as msnbc.com did, which itself was based on the design of the NBC News website.

Versant did update the logo and color scheme.

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The site also dropped the largely similar typography that nbcnews.com continues to use, including the sans serif Founders Grotesk and serif Publico. 

Instead, the MS NOW site uses  the sans serif Cooper Hewitt for headlines and serif Merriweather for body text. 

Cooper Hewitt was originally designed by Pentagram and based on Polaris Condensed for Cooper Hewitt, the design-focused New York City museum that is part of the Smithsonian Institution and has an open source license. Merriweather is also open source.

It’s worth noting that these two fonts have some visual similarities to Founders Grotesk and Publico, a choice that may have been made to help keep the site updates from being too drastic.