Media Decoder: Oprah Winfrey Network Chief Is Out

 OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network Christina Norman, left, with Oprah Winfrey and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, celebrating the start of OWN on Jan. 1, 2011. Ms. Norman is exiting the channel.

9:17 p.m. | Updated | Dissatisfied by the first ratings report cards for OWN, Oprah Winfrey and her business partner, Discovery Communications, said on Friday that they had dismissed the four-month-old channel’s chief executive, Christina Norman.

Peter Liguori, the chief operating officer for Discovery Communications, will take over OWN through at least the end of the year. His assignment is formidable: to lure more viewers to a fledgling channel that most people cannot easily find on their cable systems and to manage the introduction for its two most anticipated programs, one featuring Ms. Winfrey and one featuring Rosie O’Donnell.

Mr. Liguori indicated in an interview that he would try to amp up the entertainment value of OWN’s programs without losing sight of Ms. Winfrey’s live-your-best-life principles. “I think you’re going to see more joy on the network,” he said. Ms. Winfrey and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, preached patience in the months preceding the Jan. 1 introduction of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, which is built around the supremely valuable Oprah brand. But both have been disappointed by the low ratings for the channel’s mix of feel-good reality shows, talk shows and films. On a total day basis, OWN is barely outperforming the channel it replaced, Discovery Health, despite hundreds of million of dollars of investment.

Already, Discovery has backed off its bold prediction that OWN will be profitable this year. A Discovery spokesman said profitability depended on “rating success, affiliate fees and the strength of the advertising market.”

Kevin Winter/Getty Images For AFI Oprah Winfrey and Peter Liguori, who will take over OWN, Ms. Winfrey’s fledgling channel, through at least year’s end.

Mr. Zaslav acknowledged to investors last week that the channel had a “slower start” than expected. And Ms. Winfrey said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, published Friday, that “it’s not where I want it to be.”

In part that is because Ms. Winfrey herself has not been a steady presence on the channel — a fact that Ms. Norman noted time and time again in past interviews. Ms. Winfrey is busy winding down her syndicated talk show, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which will end on May 25, and only after that point — and a vacation — will she turn her full attention to OWN.

The highest-rated shows on OWN have been “Ask Oprah’s All Stars,” with advice from people like Dr. Mehmet Oz; “Our America With Lisa Ling”; and “The Judds.” In its first four months, OWN attracted 148,000 viewers at any given time, according to the Nielsen Company, only 7,000 more than Discovery Health did in the same time period last year. In the prime-time hours, OWN averaged 297,000 viewers, 44,000 more than Discovery Health.

The decision to oust Ms. Norman was the culmination of several recent conversations among members of the board that oversees OWN, according to two people with direct knowledge of the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their employers had not authorized them to speak.

In an e-mail message to the staff at OWN, Ms. Winfrey said that Ms. Norman’s “hard work, passion and leadership were instrumental in getting OWN on the air,” but added, “Given all that we have to do, the OWN board felt it was necessary that we have a different kind of leadership in place for the next phase of OWN’s growth.”

What the board was seeking, according to the people with direct knowledge of the decision, was a person to improve the channel’s programming voice. “Right now it’s all about the programming,” one of the people said. Mr. Liguori has programming cachet as the former president of entertainment for the Fox Broadcasting Company. He said in an interview that he would apply lessons of the last four months — for instance, that straightforward how-to shows and darker subject matter don’t work as well as shows that are more clearly entertaining. One underperforming show he cited was “Addicted to Food,” which chronicled people’s treatment for eating disorders.

“With all its good intentions, it was just hard for the audience to watch,” he said.

Mr. Liguori said that every show on OWN should be purposeful, in keeping with Ms. Winfrey’s carefully cultivated brand. “But the price of entry for that purpose — that show’s intent, its message, its takeaway — is that you are entertained,” he said.

Asked to elaborate, he said, “It’s going to be compelling characters, storytelling with stakes, and then at the end of the show, you realize you have learned either some moral or practical lesson.”

Ms. Norman did not respond to a request for comment. She was the second chief executive of OWN, having taken over in January 2009 while the channel was trying — and at times struggling — to start up. While Ms. Winfrey provided the vision for the channel, it was Ms. Norman, a former president of MTV, who executed on that vision. She said in a statement Friday, “As I move on to my next challenge, I am confident the strong foundation we have built will position the network to achieve great things.”

A day earlier, Judy McGrath departed MTV Networks, prompting speculation that Ms. McGrath could be in line for the OWN job. But Mr. Liguori called the timing “pure coincidence.”

Mr. Liguori will oversee the introduction of Ms. O’Donnell’s talk show in October, and Ms. Winfrey’s next show, “Oprah’s Next Chapter,” in January 2012. (OWN executives had hoped to start “Next Chapter” in the fall.)

Mr. Zaslav reiterated last week that Discovery was “fully committed to the brand” and reminded investors that building a channel was a “long-term play.”

For her part, Ms. Winfrey has suggested that the channel should not be judged for three years. “I feel like I have not begun to give anything to OWN,” she told Entertainment Weekly. But that will change, she said, after her syndicated show ends — and, presumably, after that vacation. “It’s going to improve exponentially with the amount of time and service I can give to it.”

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Media Decoder: Samsung Takes New Camera on a National Tour

 Samsung will go coast to coast to highlight its SH100 camera.

The makers of the Samsung SH100 digital camera are taking a literal approach to product placement in a marketing campaign that starts on Monday.

The campaign, called the Samsung Coast to Coast Photo Post, will put a single SH100 into the hands of people in 25 cities across the country so they can use it to post photos on various social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Picasa. The campaign is intended to highlight the camera’s ability to instantly upload photos to the Web, something that an increasing number of cellphone cameras already do.

“We know consumers are increasingly sharing content,” said Reid Sullivan, the company’s senior vice president for mobile entertainment for the United States, adding that the quality of cellphone camera photos is no match for the Samsung device.

Samsung teamed up with the digital agency Mekanism to create the campaign, which is scheduled to start in Los Angeles and end in New York City at the end of the month. The initiative represents the first time the brand and the agency have worked together.

In order to pass the single camera from city to city, a small team from Samsung will visit each location and hand over the device to a person they have deemed a “social influencer” for the day. The goal is to create “little snapshots of Americana,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Representatives from Mekanism will document the approximately 3,600-mile journey in user-generated photographs, and the collection will be shown at a gallery event in June in New York City. The photo that generates the most “likes” on Facebook will be deemed the best of the bunch. Additional promotions will include product demonstration videos on YouTube, in-store dealer promotions and newspaper ads.

 

Media Decoder: A Case of Mistaken Identity

 

OTTAWA — Shortly before the start of Canada’s current federal election campaign, which concludes on Monday, the governing Conservatives had something they believed would seriously undermine the credibility of Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party.

Adrian Wyld/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Michael Ignatieff, head of the Liberal Party in Canada.

They came across a photograph on the Internet that showed six men wearing Santa Claus hats and American battle gear posing with weapons in front of an American military helicopter in Kuwait prior to the Iraq war. One of the men resembles Mr. Ignatieff, who directed a human rights center at Harvard before returning to his native Canada to take up political life.

To the Conservatives, the photograph, combined with other bits and pieces, suggested that Mr. Ignatieff had not only supported the invasion of Iraq when he was at Harvard — a position he has subsequently retracted — but also that he had been directly and secretly involved with the United States military in planning the attack. If true, this information would have been a setback for Mr. Ignatieff, who leads a center-left party in a country where the war in Iraq had little support.

Rather than release the information, the Conservatives passed it along to Sun Media, a Conservative-friendly tabloid newspaper chain, which started a television news channel in April that is sometimes compared to Fox News.

But although Mr. Ignatieff and the man in the photograph both have bushy eyebrows, they are not the same person. And ultimately the leak ended up harming the Conservatives’ credibility and souring the party’s relationship with Sun Media.

In an extraordinary move last week, Pierre Karl Péladeau, the president and chief executive of Sun Media, published a lengthy editorial in his newspapers that exposed the Conservatives as the newspapers’ source and condemned the party for the attempted smear, which he said was apparently intended to damage Mr. Ignatieff as well as Sun Media’s new television channel.

“It is the ultimate source of this material that is profoundly troubling to me, my colleagues and, I think, should be of concern to all Canadians,” Mr. Péladeau wrote.

The material, Mr. Péladeau revealed, had been passed along on behalf of the Conservatives by Patrick Muttart, a former senior aide to Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister. Mr. Muttart now works at Mercury Public Affairs in Chicago and is no stranger to Sun Media. Last year, he was retained through Mercury to help develop the Sun News channel, and during his time in Canada he worked with Kory Teneycke, Mr. Harper’s former spokesman who is now vice president of Sun News.

In an interview, Mr. Péladeau said that Mr. Muttart repeatedly failed to deliver a high-resolution version of the photograph to Sun Media. When that clearer image finally arrived, hours before The Toronto Sun was about to go to press with the photograph on its front page, it was apparent that the man in the photo is not Mr. Ignatieff.

Given the nature of the source, Mr. Péladeau said that he had a responsibility to expose the Conservatives, even though his news media outlets had not ultimately claimed the man in the photo was Mr. Ignatieff.

“It’s unusual,” Mr. Péladeau said about his editorial. “This specific situation was also highly unusual. Standing on this issue was particularly important.”

Mr. Muttart, who had been one of Mr. Harper’s key campaign organizers, left his campaign last week.

In an interview, Mr. Muttart said that “never, ever did we say that we had positively identified the individual in question as Michael Ignatieff.”

He recalled telling a Sun News producer: “It’s yours; do your due diligence, and see what you find out.”

As for the delay in delivering the high-resolution version of the photograph, Mr. Muttart blamed a clerical mix-up by the campaign.

Mr. Muttart said he is puzzled by Mr. Péladeau’s suggestion that he and the Conservatives set out to undermine the news channel he helped create.

“I’m completely baffled,” Mr. Muttart said. “For whatever reason, Mr. Péladeau wanted to make an example out of somebody to assert the editorial independence of the Sun Media organization.”

 

Media Decoder: The Next Daily Deal

  The new SaverTime Web service.

The daily deal coupon world is set to get a little bigger on Monday when the company behind the direct mail PennySaver fliers known throughout California begins a Web service called SaverTime.

“We’ve always been the champion of the little guy,” said Loren Dalton, president of PennySaverUSA.com and SaverTime.com. “We’re trying to help even the field for them as they play against the big boys online now.”

The SaverTime site is intended to compete with the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial in a few important ways, Mr. Dalton said. Placing a deal with the service is free for a small business, which then splits the revenue evenly with SaverTime.

The company says its deals are aimed at more specific geographic locations than just a ZIP code. People who use a coupon will receive a SaverTime Sequel coupon for a similar offer, which is aimed at creating repeat business, Mr. Dalton said.

“I was really pleased with the fact that this was more territorial, more segmented to my area,” said Lynn Sanders, the owner of the Earth Wise Nutritional Centers outlet in Lake Forest, Calif.

Ms. Sanders is offering customers $40 worth of vitamins for $20. “In today’s economy people want to get the best buys,” she said. “Once I get someone in the door I have the opportunity to show what I’m all about.”

There are also incentives for those who register their friends. SaverTime’s 5-3-2 Network allows a user to get a credit of 2 to 5 percent of the dollar amount of purchases made by people associated with that user’s network.

The service will be available on Monday in about 20 areas in California, and the company says it is training nearly 400 sales representatives to sell Web coupons in addition to print coupons.

People interested in SaverTime deals can sign up for an e-mail alert or go to the Web site. A SaverTime mobile application is in the works, and the site encourages people outside California to “tell us where you would like to see us next!”