Bad news for WEEK — Oprah’s bolting to cable only

November 5, 2009
By Billy Dennis

And it’s bad news for a LOT of local TV stations. Deadline.com is reporting that Oprah is giving up on free TV for a new cable-only Oprah Winfrey network:

I’ve learned that in coming days Winfrey and Discovery will issue a press release announcing OWN’s on-air launch for the start of 2011. And, in several weeks, Oprah will tell the public that she’s ending her syndicated Chicago-based daytime talk show when her current deal runs out and moving it to OWN headquarters in Los Angeles probably as soon as mid-2011.

This is bad news for WEEK, because much of ratings success for it’s own 5 p.m. news is that it follows Oprah.

And their 10 p.m. news has GOT to be hurting because NBC decided to put Jay Leno on at 9 p.m. every weeknight. The spectacularly low ratings must be having on effect on WEEK news ratings.

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2 Responses to “ Bad news for WEEK — Oprah’s bolting to cable only ”

  1. 11bravo on November 5, 2009 at 12:48 pm

    You forgot to mention the production quality has gone down the crapper, too! I really would like to keep watching WEEK news because I have grown up watching that channel but it’s like the producers just decided, “Eh, we’re number one what are they going to do, watch someone else?”. The new group of reporters isn’t anything fantastic except for Maggie Vespa, but she hasn’t been on in a long time and probably isn’t even at the station any longer. They try doing “hard hitting” news with bits like the “Sexting” segment they did a week or two ago but they’re junior reporters can’t pull ‘em off. On the plus side, Jim Mattson has made the sports segment great whether you like sports or not but I could care less about whether I get my weather from Chuck Collins or some no name so I am not sure why they brought him over.

  2. Precinct Committeeman on November 5, 2009 at 6:19 pm

    We can only hope Oprah goes the way of Howard Stern (Satelite only)