Paul Beaty/Associated PressOprah Winfrey at an industry conference in June.Oprah Winfrey stood before cable company executives at an industry conference last month and admitted that the beginning of OWN, her cable channel, was not going well, in part because she had been too focused on the end of her daytime talk show.
Now, she told them, she had “the ability to commit my full energy, feet first,” to the channel.
On Wednesday she did just that, naming herself the chief executive of OWN and effectively combining the Los Angeles-based channel with her Chicago-based production company, Harpo Studios, in an effort to reboot the channel, which has been burdened by low ratings in its first six months.
“This concept of mine, of one team, one mission and one vision is about to become a day-to-day reality,” she wrote in an e-mail message to staff members at both OWN and Harpo on Wednesday morning.
Significantly, the channel said in a news release that all of Harpo’s future television projects “will be directed exclusively to OWN.”
Erik Logan and Sheri Salata, the two presidents of Harpo Studios, will immediately become the presidents of OWN, too. Then, in the fall, Ms. Winfrey will take over as chief executive. She also will take the title of chief creative officer, which was originally held by Lisa Erspamer, one of her top lieutenants.
Ms. Winfrey will remain the chairman of OWN, which is a joint venture between Harpo and Discovery Communications. Ms. Erspamer will continue as OWN’s executive vice president of production and development.
Ms. Winfrey’s consolidation of power suggests that she will be much more involved in the day-to-day decisions for the channel, a change sought by executives at Discovery and television critics. The channel also may wind up with more programming starring Ms. Winfrey, who is contractually obligated to appear in 70 telecasts a year.
Ms. Winfrey’s new role is another sharp shift in the leadership structure at OWN, where just two months ago, Ms. Winfrey and the other members of the OWN board dismissed Christina Norman , who had led the channel before and after its debut. The board installed Peter Liguori, the chief operating officer of Discovery, as the interim chief executive, and people close to Mr. Liguori said at the time that he expected to be in the job for a year or more.
That changed last month, after Ms. Winfrey spent a long-planned vacation in Europe and Africa after the May 24 finale of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” At the cable industry conference in Chicago on June 16, she affirmed her commitment to OWN; the next day, she participated in a marathon meeting with members of the OWN board about the direction of the channel.
By the end of the month, Ms. Winfrey decided that she should become the channel’s chief executive. The OWN board had not yet started to search for a permanent chief to replace Ms. Norman.
As the presidents of OWN, Mr. Logan and Ms. Salata — who are well known to viewers of “Season 25: Oprah Behind The Scenes,” a reality show on OWN about the making of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — will report to Ms. Winfrey. Mr. Logan will work out of OWN’s office in Los Angeles and travel to Harpo’s Chicago office regularly; Ms. Salata will do the reverse.
“I have no doubt that we will all be in lockstep in a very short time,” Ms. Winfrey wrote to her staff on Wednesday. She added, “We are in this boat together in a very real way now. And I will put my brand and my future on the line because I know this one team — OWN/Harpo — is the boat I want to be in.”
A restart of sorts will take place for OWN on Oct. 10. On that day, a new daytime talk show hosted by Rosie O’Donnell and repackaged old episodes of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” will start being shown.
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