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MEDIA & MARKETING | JULY 14, 2011 Struggling Oprah Network to Name New CEO: Oprah BY LAUREN A. E. SCHUKER The queen of daytime television is moving into the corner office. Oprah Winfrey is poised to become chief executive of her cable channel, OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network, starting sometime in the fall, according to people close to the venture. She will also serve as chief creative officer of the network, these people said, expanding on her previous role as chairman of the channel. Ms. Winfrey's expected ascent to CEO comes after OWN has endured several management shake-ups and suffered mediocre ratings. At points this spring, OWN's viewership fell below the audience for the little-watched Discovery Health, the channel OWN replaced. In May, four months after its debut, the channel fired its chief executive Christina Norman. Multiple programming and marketing executives also left the network last year as part of another shake-up. And the original president of OWN and other programming executives left after Ms. Norman was named CEO in 2009. OWN, which is jointly owned by Ms. Winfrey and Discovery Communications Inc., appointed Peter Liguori, Discovery's chief operating officer, as interim CEO after Ms. Norman's firing, and he's expected to stay on in that role for at least several months during the transition. Ms. Winfrey's move highlights her desire to take full creative and operational control of the six-month-old channel. Her syndicated talk show ended in May, and since then she has expressed a strong willingness to run the channel in a much more hands-on manner and align it more closely with her television-production company Harpo Studios, a person familiar with her thinking said. Since ending her show, she has spent time hobnobbing with media executives, raising her profile as a business operator by attending industry events. That became clear last week, when she spent several days at Allen & Co.'s annual media conference, telling the heads of the world's largest media and technology companies that the purpose of her network is to help people find their "inner light," other people familiar with the matter said. In addition to Ms. Winfrey, several other executives are expected to join the ranks of OWN, people close to the situation said. Erik Logan and Sheri Salata, the current presidents of Harpo Studios, are expected to take over as presidents of OWN starting in mid-July, these people said. Harpo Studios is the television unit of Harpo Productions Inc. Harpo, which produced Ms. Winfrey's daily talk show until its end in May, will also start directing all of its new television production exclusively toward filling OWN's programming needs, these people said. Although OWN had a strong debut when it launched on Jan. 1, drawing more than one million viewers for its first prime-time shows, the network has failed to hold onto that audience in the intervening months and needs some higher-profile shows to draw in a wider viewership. Several big shows are set to debut on OWN in October, around when Ms. Winfrey is expected to officially take the reins. Those include "Rosie," a new daily talk show hosted by comedian Rosie O'Donnell, as well as "Oprah's Encore," a compendium of Ms. Winfrey's old talk shows enhanced by new commentary from her. In January 2012, Ms. Winfrey's new prime-time show, "Oprah's Next Chapter," is expected to debut on the network. Since launching, OWN has debuted 20 original series on the air, including a reality program showing how Ms. Winfrey put together the final year of her iconic talk show, called "Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes" and a six-part series titled "Finding Sarah" that chronicled how Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, worked through personal issues alongside a series of experts such as Dr. Phil. >From January through July 11, about 267,000 people, on average, watched OWN during prime-time, according to the Nielsen Co. That's 5% more than the 255,000 people, on average, who tuned in to Discovery Health during prime time for roughly the same time period in 2010. OWN also made small gains with women in its target demographic. About 88,000 women between 25 and 54 years old tuned in, on average, to OWN during prime-time from January through July 11, roughly 5% more than the 84,000 women in that demographic that tuned in to Discovery Health during a similar period in 2010, according to Nielsen Co. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
