Television: Struggles at Oprah’s network
Oprah Winfrey’s OWN cable channel has too much debt and too few viewers, said Edmund Lee and Andy Fixmer in Bloomberg Businessweek. Co-owner Discovery Communications has poured at least $585 million into OWN, including more than $300 million in loans, and “so far it hasn’t been a winning investment.” Ratings have been “surprisingly lackluster,” averaging 326,000 prime-time viewers per day, compared with competitor Bravo’s 961,000. Winfrey has lately realized that her legacy as the queen of talk-show television is on the line. “I am in the climb of my life,” Winfrey told advertisers in New York last month.
Winfrey is now “on the offensive,” said Christopher S. Stewart in The Wall Street Journal. She admits she should have pulled the plug on her popular talk show before she launched OWN, in January 2011, so she could concentrate on the network from the start. Not until last summer did she take over as CEO to push for more consistent programming, make layoffs, and meet personally with advertisers. Ratings are slowly ticking up, and her new talk show, Oprah’s Next Chapter, is beginning to catch on. But Winfrey says it could be late next year before the network finally finds its footing.
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Companies: Exxon tops Fortune 500
ExxonMobil has reclaimed the title of America’s biggest corporate revenue-maker, said Shawn Tully in Fortune. The energy company’s $453 billion in 2011 revenues, a 28 percent increase over 2010, narrowly edged out the previous year’s No. 1, Walmart, for the top spot on the Fortune 500. Overall, U.S. corporations are defying the economy’s “sluggish recovery.” The combined profits of the 500 biggest U.S. corporations jumped 16 percent to a record $825 billion in 2011. Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and General Motors rounded out the top five.
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Bailout: Treasury sells part of AIG stake
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