Welcome back, I'm Dylan Byers.

You're reading In The Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry.

In today’s column, what I’m hearing about Rachel Maddow’s eight-figure disappearing act from MSNBC’s primetime lineup—and what her next act presages for the future of cable news, itself. If Maddow doesn’t want to stick around to fight the daily ratings game, after all, why should MSNBC?

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The Maddow Iceberg

Maddow’s non-surprise surprise announcement has been foreshadowed for months. So why doesn’t the network have a viable solution? Is 20 percent Maddow at 1.25x or so the price really better than nothing? And at what cost?

This week, NBC News published a bit of evergreen, service-y consumer trivia: nearly one-third of Americans wait til the last minute to file their taxes. The gist, of course, was that such procrastination is absurd. Tax day is inevitable, so why does anyone wait until the eleventh hour to deal with it?

The same question might reasonably be asked of NBC’s handling of Rachel Maddow’s long-anticipated departure from her nightly MSNBC show. Seven months ago, Maddow and her superagents at WME struck a $30 million-a-year deal with NBCUniversal C.E.O. Jeff Shell that gave Maddow the option to end her nightly show on April 30 and instead focus on other projects, like specials and documentaries and podcasts and other I.P. In short, she was being paid more to focus on higher-value projects, allowing her to ease off the still very profitable, but declining, and certainly less relevant world of cable news. The press heralded it at the time as Maddow being paid more to do less, simply to keep her in-house, and it’s hard to argue with this proclamation...

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