The Takeaway: Oprah, On TV at Last

New York Times: Oprah Winfrey's new cable channel, OWN, will debut in 2009, taking over what is now Discovery Health. Owing to existing agreements, OWN won't be able to get The Oprah Winfrey Show until 2010 at the earliest.

Wall Street Journal: Winfrey "will decide this fall" whether to move her show over to OWN when those contracts expire. If OWN does get Oprah, that would hurt CBS, which owns the show's syndicator, King World, and it would hurt NBC Universal, which owns competing women's channel Oxygen.

WWD: Might Winfrey name her friend and collaborator Gayle King CEO of OWN? King has prior TV experience.

Mediaweek: Oprah being Oprah, OWN naturally has a quasi-spiritual genesis story:

Last year, Discovery CEO David Zaslav first approached Winfrey with the notion of launching a jointly-owned cable network, promising that the media conglomerate would put the weight of its considerable resources behind the venture.

For Winfrey, that first meeting was nothing short of kismet. Two days before she sat down with Zaslav, Winfrey came across a journal from 1992 in which she sketched out a plan to create her own lifestyle network.