News comes as leading network star criticizes management for decision to cancel shows hosted by non-white anchors

MSNBC has told the majority of the employees who produce Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid’s prime-time evening news shows they are being let go as part of the network’s programming overhaul with the option to apply for new roles, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

Maddow, the biggest star and highest-rated anchor at MSNBC, will get to keep her executive producer, Cory Gnazzo, and several other senior producers, the people said.

But the rest of Maddow’s team – along with producers who worked on the other cancelled shows, hosted by Katie Phang, Jonathan Capehart, Ayman Mohyeldin and José Díaz-Balart – have been given the option to claim severance or reapply for new roles at the network, the people said.

The Maddow team was let go because of a quirk of how they worked on both Maddow’s show and Alex Wagner’s show, when Maddow scaled back to hosting only Mondays and Wagner hosted Tuesday to Friday.

Maddow is currently hosting five nights a week for the first 100 days of the Trump administration, but when she returns to Mondays only and the programming shake-up takes effect on 21 April, Jen Psaki, the former Biden White House press secretary, will take over the Tuesday-to-Friday slot.

An MSNBC source said that the changes were not “widespread layoffs” but rather the reallocation of producers to support new programs and priorities. They said the new roles were being posted internally first and would not be posted externally until affected employees had had a chance to reapply.

The manner of the personnel changes – having employees reapply for roles in time slots they already produce – are unprecedented at MSNBC at this scale. Typically, MSNBC has taken great pains to redistribute staffers without laying them off after shows have been cancelled.

But it all comes at a turbulent time for the cable news industry in general. MSNBC is being spun off by NBCUniversal and is trying to find cost savings, similar to how CNN laid off 200 employees last month as its new chief executive, Mark Thompson, attempts to pivot to a digital strategy.

Some staffers in Washington DC have privately expressed concern that the new postings could predominantly be in New York, where the hourly pay rates negotiated by the various unions are understood to be lower. New jobs in New York could also require relocation.

Over the weekend, Status reported that a staff member from Reid’s show asked the new MSNBC president, Rebecca Kutler, about the future of the show’s staff. Kutler reportedly confirmed that staff would be let go but assured them that they would remain employees until April and would receive severance packages.

Kutler also reportedly told them that more than 100 new roles would be posted this week and encouraged affected staff members to apply. She added that six months from now, there would be more employees at MSNBC than there are currently.

On Monday night, Maddow appeared to criticize MSNBC for the recent programming shake-ups and the treatment of its staff during a monologue on her show.

Maddow expressed concern for the dozens of producers and staff who work behind the scenes, saying that they were “really being put through the wringer”, facing potential layoffs and being “invited to reapply for new jobs”.

Maddow remarked: “That has never happened at this scale, in this way before when it comes to programming changes, presumably because it’s not the right way to treat people, and it’s inefficient and it’s unnecessary and it kind of drops the bottom out of whether or not people feel like this is a good place to work, and so we don’t generally do things that way.”

The anchor also called Reid’s firing a “bad mistake” during the monologue, and stated that she did not want to lose Reid as a colleague at MSNBC.

“Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door,” Maddow said. “It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think.”

She added: “It is also unnerving to see on a network where we’ve got two, two non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible and I do not defend it.”