When Katie Phang and Joy Reid walked back into MSNBC’s headquarters last Friday, they thought it would be a quick, bittersweet trip. Their purpose was simple: collect the last boxes from their offices, quietly slip out, and close a chapter neither of them had expected to end so abruptly.
But television goodbyes rarely play out the way you imagine—and this one would turn into something they could never have prepared for.
Since the day MSNBC parted ways with several of its non-white hosts, there had been one hallway that felt different. It used to be a lively stretch between the studios and the green rooms, lined with framed portraits of on-air talent—smiling faces captured in moments of pride, accomplishment, and history-making coverage. Joy’s face had been there. Katie’s too. They had greeted employees and visitors every day, even when they weren’t physically in the building.
But after the shake-up, the portraits were quietly taken down. What remained was a bare, white wall that seemed to hum with absence.
Rachel Maddow, who had watched her friends leave under circumstances she wished she could change, hated that wall. She hated the message it sent—that the people who had stood there were now invisible, their years of work erased with a few turns of a screwdriver.
So, in the middle of a quiet weekday, she decided to change it.
Rachel didn’t replace the old portraits—that would have required corporate approval, and she knew she wouldn’t get it. Instead, she went to the supply closet, pulled out the largest whiteboard she could find, and mounted it right in the center of that hallway. In the top corner, she wrote just three words in her own handwriting: “They Were Here.”
She left a stack of markers nearby. No instructions. No fanfare. Just a space, an invitation, and the unspoken hope that people would use it.
On the first day, the board had only a few scribbles. A heart. A short “Thank you, Joy.” Someone else wrote, “Katie, you inspired me to speak up in meetings.”
By Wednesday, more words began to appear. A former camera operator who had retired years earlier stopped by the building and left a note about how Joy’s on-air grace had helped him through a rough patch in his life. A production assistant scribbled her thanks to Katie for a small but unforgettable act of kindness—a coffee bought on her first nervous day.
By Thursday afternoon, the board was nearly half full. Messages came from current employees, former ones, and even visitors who happened to be in the building for unrelated meetings. Some of them had never spoken to Joy or Katie directly, yet they still felt compelled to write. They remembered a segment. A laugh. A pointed question in an interview that stuck with them.
By the end of the week, the transformation was astonishing. The whiteboard was no longer a single panel—it had grown. Employees had added extra sheets of paper taped around it, filling every available inch of wall space. The once-empty hallway had become a mosaic of color, ink, and raw emotion.
Some notes were long and reflective, others short but loaded with feeling:
“I learned to love politics watching you.”
“Joy, you made me believe I could be myself on-air.”
“Katie, I’ll never forget you covering my story like it mattered.”
“This place isn’t the same without you.”
There were doodles, too—portraits, caricatures, even a small drawing of the two hosts sitting side by side at the anchor desk. Someone had written a quote from Joy’s very first night hosting, encircled in stars. Another had written a joke Katie once cracked on live TV, still funny enough to make people stop and smile as they walked past.
When Joy and Katie finally came to pick up their boxes, they weren’t expecting any of it.
They turned the corner into the hallway, still bracing for the sight of that sterile emptiness they had dreaded. Instead, they stopped in their tracks.
Katie’s hand flew to her mouth. Joy, uncharacteristically speechless, just stood there, eyes moving over the wall. It wasn’t just that there were so many messages—it was who they were from. There were names they recognized instantly, but also dozens they didn’t. People from different departments. People they had never met. People who had been touched by their work without them even knowing.
Rachel appeared a few moments later, leaning casually against the doorway at the far end of the hall. “Figured it shouldn’t look like no one ever existed here,” she said, her voice as gentle as it was matter-of-fact.
Joy laughed through tears. Katie hugged Rachel so tightly that her boxes nearly tipped over.
The three women stood there for almost an hour, reading message after message. They recognized inside jokes from newsroom meetings, saw heartfelt goodbyes from staff who had left the network years ago, and even found notes from loyal viewers who had somehow gained access to the building through friends or former colleagues just to write a farewell.
It wasn’t just a wall of ink. It was a living history.
For Katie and Joy, the week had been filled with the logistical noise of moving on—closing accounts, clearing offices, signing paperwork. But that wall cut through all of it. It reminded them that their time at MSNBC hadn’t just been about ratings, scripts, or studio lights. It had been about people. Real people, whose lives they had touched in ways they might never have seen without this moment.
By the time they left that day, they weren’t carrying just their boxes. They carried the warmth of every handwritten word, every drawing, every signature.
The hallway no longer felt empty. And in the strange way only television life can work, the farewell they received was bigger than any on-air tribute could have been.
Before walking out for the last time, Joy turned back and snapped a photo of the wall. “So they can’t erase this,” she said. Katie nodded.
Rachel stayed behind a little longer. She picked up a marker, found a small blank space in the corner, and added one more line:
“This wall will remember you, even if they don’t.”
And in that hallway, the story of two beloved hosts found its true ending—not in silence, but in a chorus of gratitude, inked forever in the place they once called home.
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