The New York Times

Winfrey Bets on Her Future With Cable



By BRIAN STELTER and BILL CARTER
Published: November 19, 2009

Oprah Winfrey is giving network television one of her trademark aha moments.

Harpo Productions, via Associated Press

Oprah Winfrey, with Tom Cruise, in a 2008 photo. Ms. Winfrey's show on ABC will end on Sept. 9, 2011, in its 25th season.
Multimedia


Ms. Winfrey, the billionaire queen of daytime television, is planning to announce on Friday that she will step down from her daily pulpit, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in two years in order to concentrate on the forthcoming cable channel that will bear her name.

“The sun will set on the Oprah show as its 25th season draws to a close on Sept. 9, 2011,” Tim Bennett, the president of Ms. Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, said in a letter to her 214 local TV stations on Thursday evening. She will appear on her cable channel, called OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network, in some form. But “The Oprah Winfrey Show” will no longer be.

The list of repercussions of her decision is long. For CBS, the owner of syndication rights to her show, it means the loss of its signature program and millions of dollars every year in revenue.

For ABC stations, where her show was largely seen, it means the loss of daytime’s most popular program, a generator of giant audiences leading into evening news programs.

Larry Gerbrandt, an analyst for the firm Media Valuation Partners, said “any show that ABC comes up with to replace her will not draw anything near the ratings guarantee they could count on with Oprah. At least for the first year, ABC is going to take a serious hit.”

More widely, her departure will surely be interpreted as an endorsement of the cable TV business, and a blow to the fortunes of broadcast television. Discovery Communications, which will co-own the new channel, announced the creation of OWN 20 months ago. Now Discovery will parlay Ms. Winfrey’s anticipated exit from broadcast into higher per-subscriber fees and will also seek more lucrative commitments from advertisers.

For Ms. Winfrey herself, the move represents an enormous bet — that her popularity and golden touch with programming can sustain an entire cable channel and that she’ll remain a central cultural figure even without the mass exposure of broadcast television every day.

Far and away the most popular daytime talk show host, Ms. Winfrey has spent two decades spinning her TV fame into a vast media empire, including her own show, a popular magazine, a book club and several movies. She is also one of the most successful daytime producers in television, with longtime talk shows like “Dr. Phil,” “Rachael Ray” and “The Dr. Oz Show,” this season’s syndicated success story.

Her talk show regularly draws seven million viewers, nearly twice as many as the next biggest talk show, “Dr. Phil.” Her endorsement of Barack Obama is widely credited with helping elect him president in 2008. She even claims to own the trademark on the phrase “Aha moment.”

Ms. Winfrey, 55, told the staff of her Chicago-based show about her decision late on Thursday afternoon, according to people who were told but who insisted on anonymity because they agreed to wait until Ms. Winfrey makes the official announcement. Then she informed her business partners at the networks and instructed Harpo employees to start calling her affiliate stations. The stations were told they could report her decision on local newscasts, apparently to increase audiences for her formal announcement on Friday.

It remains unclear what on-camera role Ms. Winfrey will have at OWN, which is a 50-50 joint venture with Discovery. The management team at OWN has been busy creating a programming plan but has remained mostly silent about the lineup in deference to Ms. Winfrey and her decision-making process. Discovery executives declined to comment on Thursday evening. The OWN channel will have its premiere in January 2011, according to a person with knowledge of Ms. Winfrey’s decision who insisted on anonymity.

Ms. Winfrey made clear to her staff members that she will not transfer the show to cable. She is expected to produce new programs for OWN, and will appear occasionally on some of them.

Ms. Winfrey was believed to be in renewal talks this fall with CBS Television Distribution and another syndicator, Sony, which distributes her most recent spinoff, “Dr. Oz.” At the same time, she considered ending her talk show altogether. In recent days television executives said they sensed that Ms. Winfrey was leaning toward an exit.
CBS seemed eager to keep its door propped open for Ms. Winfrey, saying in a statement that, “We look forward to working with her for the next several years, and hopefully afterwards as well.” Acknowledging OWN, they added, “We know that anything she turns her hand to will be a great success.”
OWN is expected to replace the Discovery Health Channel, which is currently available in more than 70 million homes. Her cable plans, however, have been fraught with delays. OWN was announced in January 2008 and was originally expected to make its debut this winter, but those plans were scuttled because of management turnover and a turbulent advertising climate.

Still, Discovery’s chief executive, David Zaslav, predicted this day might come, saying a year ago, “Her show will go off of ABC in syndication and she will come to OWN.”

“This is her chapter two,” Mr. Zaslav said then.

During her decades of daytime TV, she had a number of highlights, including a show in 1988 when she appeared after losing 67 pounds, a show in 2005 when the actor Tom Cruise declared his love for the actress Katie Holmes by leaping all over Ms. Winfrey’s couch, and another show that year when she sent her audience members into a screaming frenzy by giving them all free cars.

Ms. Winfrey’s show was at the height of its popularity when she conducted what was at the time called the most-watched interview of all time with the singer Michael Jackson. That prime-time special in 1993 was seen by 62 million people in the United States and almost 100 million people worldwide.

Robert Thompson, a professor of television at Syracuse, said Ms. Winfrey’s impact on the medium and the culture has “always been characterized by hyperbole: the biggest this, the most-viewed that.”

He added, “We have come to use the term ‘Oprahfication’ in almost same way we use a term like the ‘Hellenization.’ And it’s not completely inappropriate. She was able to colonize cultural territory the way Alexander was able to colonize physical territory.”

As recently as Monday, Ms. Winfrey showed that she can command the country’s attention. Having scored the first TV interview in months with the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Ms. Winfrey asked her guest if she should be worried about competition, “because I heard you’re going to get your own talk show.”

Ms. Palin smiled and answered: “Oprah, you’re the queen of talk shows.”