* Winfrey says OWN launched before being ready
* Says channel based on her philosophy, not her presence
* Winfrey says too busy to campaign for Obama
By Christine Kearney
NEW YORK, April 2 (Reuters) – Oprah Winfrey admitted on
Monday that she had made mistakes while creating her cable
channel but promised the fledging OWN television network would
still succeed with a new strategy.
The talk show host, who recently laid off 30 staffers at the
15-month-old network after poor ratings, told “CBS This Morning”
that she had been ill-prepared for the venture.
“The idea of creating a network was something that I’d
wanted to do, had I’d known that it was this difficult, I might
have done something else,” she told the morning program
co-hosted by her longtime close friend Gayle King.
Winfrey, 58, had appeared unstoppable in her career with a
25-year reign on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” but when questioned
about whether she seriously would have never taken on the
project, she replied, “Oh absolutely.”
“I did not think it was going to be easy … but if I knew
then what I know now I might have made some different choices. I
would say if I was writing a book about it, I could call the
book ‘101 mistakes.'”
Within the top five mistakes?
“Launching when we really were not ready to launch,” she
said. “It’s like having the wedding when you know you are not
ready and you are walking down the aisle, and you are saying, ‘I
don’t know … maybe we should have postponed it.'”
Now she realizes she should have waited to launch the
network until she finished her duties hosting “The Oprah Winfrey
Show,” which ended in May 2011.
OWN, a joint venture between Winfrey and Discovery
Communications, has struggled to find a sizeable audience since
its launch in January 2011.
But Winfrey defended herself saying she had initially warned
partner Discovery that “the thing that I am most worried about
is who is going to lead this train, because I can’t do it.”
Now, she said, such is her commitment to the network that
she will not be available to campaign for President Barack Obama
in his re-election bid in a step back from her influential
campaigning for Obama in late 2007.
“I am not going to be out there. I am 100 per cent behind
our president. I actually love our president and have the utmost
respect for him and that office and what it takes to be there.
I will not be out because I am trying to fix the network,” she
said.
OWN saw a 21 percent rise in total daily viewers in the
first quarter of 2012 after Winfrey appeared more on the
channel. But it is still attracting only 180,000 viewers a day.
In March the network laid off 30 production staffers and
canceled comedian Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show after just five
months due to sagging ratings.
Winfrey admitted that along with the layoffs, the bad press
about the channel’s struggles had hurt but later added that she
felt better about her network OWN today than she ever has.
“Our strategy is to do what we should have done at the
beginning and that is to build one show, one hour, one night at
a time and then move to the next night,” she said.
Lately Winfrey boosted primetime ratings with high-profile
interviews including Whitney Houston’s family, Lady Gaga, rocker
Steven Tyler and mega-church pastor Joel Osteen.
When asked if audiences would see more of her, she replied,
“I said from the beginning, this channel can’t be based upon me,
it has to be based upon my philosophy, my ideas” and vowed not
to end the network or her general life aims.
“I believe that I am here to fulfill a calling, that because
I am a female who is African American who has been so blessed in
the world, there is never going to be a time to quit,” she said.
The channel’s inspirational tone will still fit in with its
early aims as a TV version of her “O” magazine, she said.
“I will die in the midst of doing what I love to do and that
is using my voice and using my life to try to inspire other
people to live the best of theirs.”
