O on the go
Winfrey’s latest endeavors hinge on TV show’s popularity.
BY KRIS VERA
Medill News Service
This story ran on nwitimes.com (Northwest Indiana Times)on Thursday, April 29, 2004 12:17 AM CDT
Oprah Winfrey is more than a talk show host. She can act, produce and run a successful Chicago business, Harpo Inc.
However, this is not the case for the company’s media projects. Harpo Inc.’s productions for television and print are indispensably linked to the rise and fall of Winfrey’s star power, and as long as she stays on television, her multimedia empire can’t lose.
Media industry experts do not see any pitfalls for Harpo Inc. and its projects in the near future, especially since Winfrey extended the contract for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which will air until 2008.
But these experts also see the need for her media projects to expand into productions that are not dependent on her personality. For example, Northwestern University journalism professor Charles F. Whitaker recommends that O, The Oprah Magazine, make an effort to move beyond Winfrey’s star power.
“O needs to stand for something above and beyond Oprah,” Whitaker said.
He said the popularity of Winfrey’s magazine is currently based on the “cult of Oprah.”
“People want to be like Oprah because they believe she has the key to success and happiness,” Whitaker said. “She has this happy, Zen-like state, and people tend to gravitate towards that.”
The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that the magazine’s paid circulation for the last six months of 2003 rose 17.3 percent to 2.65 million from 2.1 million in the same period of 2002.
Last year, sales at newsstands rose 38.1 percent to nearly 1 million copies. The magazine is part of the top 20 publications in newsstand sales, with Cosmopolitan at the high-end with nearly 2 million copies for the last half of 2003 and Star at the low-end of this list with 950,000 copies. Out of this list, O, the Oprah Magazine, is this only publication that could report an increase of more than 20 percent from newsstand sales.
Alissa Goldwasser, a research analyst for investment banking and brokerage firm William Blair & Company LLC in Chicago, said the commercial success of Harpo Inc and its magazine, O, the Oprah Magazine, is due to the Winfrey’s high visibility on television.
“I think people are fascinated with celebrities,” Goldwasser said. “There’s a personal relationship between these people and the celebrities.”
Three years ago, New York-based Harpo Print LLC launched O, the Oprah Magazine, with the Hearst Magazines of Hearst Corp. The magazine sells for $3.95 at newsstands.
Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Magazines said in a April 15 press release that her company’s partnership with Winfrey has proven to be “a major publishing success.” Whitaker, a former senior editor of Ebony magazine, described the magazine as the print version of her talk show. Instead of using the traditional magazine architecture of departmental articles and storytelling from a third-person perspective, Winfrey’s magazine allows the subjects to use their own voices and share life-changing experiences.
“It’s composed of short, bite-size pieces of advice and it has articles about people who come on the show,” Whitaker said. “People talk at you, in ‘O’, much in the same way they talk at you on a TV show.”
Whitaker said the format seems to be appealing. The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that magazine’s December 2003 paid circulation in Illinois was 81,000 and the state’s newsstand sales was at 34,000. In Indiana, the magazine had 36,000 for paid circulation and nearly 14,000 copies sold at newsstands.
Goldwasser, who tracks media companies such as Clear Channel Communications Inc., Univision Communications Inc., and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., declared that the success of Winfrey’s magazine depends on the status of Winfrey’s star personality.
“The celebrity has to behave in a way that her public will accept,” Goldwasser said.