Oh no! Oprah Winfrey's new network is struggling

December 11, 2011 5:59 a.m.

Next month, when the Oprah Winfrey Network debuts its new slate of shows, high on the list will be a weekly series called Oprah's Next Chapter. Executives at OWN have got to be hoping their network starts a new chapter, too.

Eleven months into her joint venture with Discovery Communications, Oprah Winfrey is getting a punishing lesson in the limitations of her legendary brand in a media landscape that has never been more cluttered.

Despite programming expenses of $135 million in 2011, OWN drew roughly the same number of viewers as the low-rated channel it replaced, Discovery Healthwhose programming budget was just $29 million, according to SNL Kagan. Two much-trumpeted shows that launched this fall, The Rosie Show and Oprah's Lifeclass, pretty much dropped off the map after modest starts.

Adding insult to injury, Ms. Winfrey's departure from the broadcast dial now appears to have been overhyped. WABC lost a chunk of audience in her old 4 p.m. time slot, but remained New York's No. 1 station.

O, the Oprah Magazine, seems to have fared a little worse. After The Oprah Winfrey Show went off the air in May, year-over-year newsstand sales plunged 43% for the July issue, came back up for August, and slid 34% for September, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. David Carey, president of parent Hearst Magazines, blamed a volatile newsstand marketplace.

The new cable venture has made some poor programming choices, observers said, and for contractual reasons Ms. Winfrey couldn't have a talk show on the channel until the fall. But the biggest problem may have been that she and her colleagues at Harpo Productions misjudged the extent of her appeal.

They had been successful for so long, without any real challengers, that they didn't understand that might not always be the case, said Bill Carroll, director of programming at consulting firm Katz Television Group.

She wouldn't be the f! irst med ia star to see her aura fade after moving to a smaller stage. Howard Stern, Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck have all gone on to freer pasturesand stopped being daily sources of water-cooler talk.

Misjudging her loyal fans

Ms. Winfrey also seems to have misjudged how loyal her millions of daily viewers would be. OWN launched to much fanfare with the repackaged Oprah Behind the Scenes, but couldn't hold an audience that was used to seeing her live.

Her big fall show, Oprah's Lifeclass, in which she presented lessons from her broadcast program, averaged just 310,000 viewers its first weekand fell to 224,000 by its fifth, according to Nielsen. Apparently, her fans prefer the Oprah who likes to dish.

That's a life lesson Ms. Winfrey might have learned as a co-founder of Oxygen back in the late 1990s. The women's cable network struggled for years to gain traction with uplifting programming, before moving on to splashy reality fare like The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency.

This is Oxygen 2.0, said Erica Gruen, principal with consulting firm Quantum Media and onetime president of The Food Network. We learned with Oxygen 1.0 that that kind of programming does not draw big audiences.

But OWN executives say they are just getting started and note that it wasn't until July that Ms. Winfrey became chief executive. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said at an investor conference last week that he expects to see a successful network over the next two or three years.

Surprise success

OWN executives also insist that shows can be entertaining and true to Ms. Winfrey's goal of improving people's lives, and point to the network's surprise success, Welcome to Sweetie Pie's, a reality series about former Ike and Tina Turner backup singer Robbie Montgomery and her soul food restaurant. The show was No. 3 in November in its time period among African-American women.

We have everybody aligned, and we know what we need to do, said OWN President E! ric Loga n, who predicted that next year will bring the normal, rhythmic continuation and progression of a startup cable network.

If Ms. Winfrey does succeed in building a hit network, it could make her richer than she already is. But it still might be a smaller kind of success than she knew on broadcast television during her 25-year run.

She'll never be as popular as she once was, said Craig Garthwaite, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, who has studied what he calls the Oprah effect. In this world [of niche channels], the people who are watching really want to watch you, but it'll be a far smaller number.