MUMBAI: Former CNN chief and veteran ABC executive Rick Kaplan was named president of MSNBC, on Tuesday. The announcement seems like latest effort in a bid to revive the struggling No. 3 cable news channel.

Kaplan replaces Erik Sorenson, who has run MSNBC since August 1998 as general manager and who will now join the news division of parent network NBC, says a media report.

Kaplan's tenure at CNN ended in 2000 with him quitting amid a major management shake-up as CNN's ratings languished near 13-year low. Kaplan's appointment puts him in charge of a network that has failed several times to assemble a winning prime-time schedule and has struggled to define itself beside its two larger rivals, Fox News Channel and CNN.

Kaplan ran CNN's domestic operations from 1997 to 2000, and then taught at Harvard. In 2003 he returned to ABC News, where he had been a longtime producer, in a senior management role planning coverage of the Iraq war and presidential campaign