Oprah Winfrey tells the Associated Press that she’s ready to fight to turn around the fortunes of her cable-television network, the Oprah Winfrey Network. And if she doesn’t succeed she has a backup plan.
Winfrey told the AP, "If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to go into organic farming in Maui. And I’m not kidding."
That seems to be close to taking a page out of the playbook of Roseanne Barr, who moved to Hawaii and bought at a 50-acre macadamia nut farm.
Talking to the AP about OWN, Winfrey said, ."Yes, some mistakes were made. Who hasn’t made mistakes? The real beauty is you can say, ‘I learned from that. I don’t worry about failure. I worry about, ‘Did I do all I could do?’ "
The network, which will mark its first anniversary on Jan. 1, got off to a rocky start partly because of skimpy programming and the lack of Winfrey herself on the network, the story says. Winfrey’s presence will increase with the debut on Sunday of a new weekly show called "Oprah’s Next Chapter."
The network has failed to improve on the low ratings of Discovery Health, the little-watched network that OWN replaced, the story says.
"I would absolutely say it is and was not where I want it to be for year one," Winfrey said. "My focus up until (last) May was doing what I do best, which is ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ and giving that my full attention" until its conclusion."
First, I love Oprah Winfrey and what she has accomplished with her life and in her career. In short, I greatly admire her.
With that said, I also believe that Oprah has suffered from over-exposure and lost a lot of her base once she got involved in politics, which of course was and is her right.
Had OWN launched about a decade ago, it probably would have been a huge deal because cable television was in a way, still in its infancy.
I wish Oprah and all of the people at OWN much success but right now feel as though “O” herself has become a turn off.