MediaFile

Now that Oprah Winfrey has set a date for when the sun will set on her syndicated talk show -- Sept 2011 -- everybody wants to know if she will recreate the show on OWN. OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, is the cable channel set to flicker on in some 80 million homes in January 2011 with Discovery Communications.

At the Reuters Media Summit in New York, Reuters Paul Thomasch put the question directly to David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications:

REUTERS: Do you expected Oprah will dedicate a lot of time to the OWN network?
DISCOVERY: When we announced OWN, Oprah talked about it as being 'her' media company. Its a 50-50 venture. We think it's going to be very significant asset. But Oprah is the chairman, she's the chief creative officer. Shes spends a lot of time on it with me and the staff, she's involved in all the creative decisions she has a ton of energy and great creativity. We always expected that she was going to be spending a lot of time in front of the screen and behind the screen.  Its a big win for us and the cable industry that (she) will be available primarily on OWN. OWN will really feel the strength and creativity of her presence.

REUTERS: Have you talked to her about bringing her current show, or something resembling her show, to OWN?
DISCOVERY: We have talked about a lot of creative ways that Oprah can have a presence on OWN (such as Master Class). Oprah has a ton of great ideas. But ultimately, what Oprah does on OWN is Oprah's decision.

REUTERS: But could we see her show show up on OWN?
DISCOVERY: "The Oprah Winfrey Show" will probably go down as the greatest show on television in terms of inspiring people, connecting with people and the overall success of it for everyone involved. But (that) chapter will be ending. You will see her, she will be on in a meaningful way. But it will be different from her show and it will be what she wants to do.

Interviewing IAC chief and media mogul Barry Diller nearly always means that you'll get more quotable quotes than you can stuff into one article. He didn't disappoint at this year's Reuters Global Media Summit on Wednesday. Here are thoughts from Diller on a range of subjects from mergers and acquisitions and Comcast to AOL, MGM and marriage.

Q: What are you going to do with the cash on the balance sheet? What's the focus? Are you still being cautious?

A: "I'd say we still are. It's definitely a looming problem. The only thing worse than spending cash stupidly is essentially not to put it down at all, not to do anything."

If you want a new National Hockey League team, you'll definitely need a spanking new arena, or at least one that's been gussied up in a significant way. But that doesn't mean it need be a super-sized arena,  Commissioner Gary Bettman said at the Reuters Global Media Summit.

"While we play to 93 to 94 percent capacity, we'd like to play to 100 percent capacity," Bettman said. "A 15,000-16,000 seat arena might work better in some markets than a 19,000 seat arena."

That's promising news for Quebec City  and Winnipeg, who were  once homes to the NHL's Nordiques and Jets respectively, and are said to be on the league's potential expansion shortlist. Bettman told Reuters that both cities, and "even Southern Ontario" would be given a serious look if the league were to expand.

Restructuring: You shouldn't be afraid to do it, even more than once if you have to, and even if your own family doesn't understand it. Just ask John Riccitiello, chief executive of videogame publisher Electronic Arts. Here's what he said at the Reuters Global Media Summit on Tuesday:

A company that doesn't restructure in the face of that dramatic transformation, I don't know what they're doing. GM had a great decade in the '70s building large cars... They didn't restructure in the face of what was obvious. The music industry kept telling us they wanted to buy albums, and then they tried to sue us. It didn't serve them well. ... We look at the future and we are aggressively embracing it... .

That means taking the big net loss at times, even though as Riccitiello stressed, that was on a "GAAP" basis. That means the bottom line. Still, media businesses tend to look at profit before various charges (often expressed as operating profit or other terms that are comparable to Wall Street analysts' expectations and are said to offer a true picture of a media business's health), and executives sometimes get irritated when you insist on reporting their bottom line performance. Why? Because a massive loss from a writedown or a restructuring shows up in the bottom line, but it is not always a sign of the business's fundamental health.

It’s been five years since Sirius lured shock jock Howard Stern to satellite radio with a $500 million contract. Whether Stern can re-up with a similar deal when his contract expires at the end of next year is anyone's guess, but it ought to be entertaining. Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin is preparing himself for negotiations with the self-proclaimed King of All Media.

In a meeting with reporters at the Reuters Media Summit on Monday, Karmazin gave us a thumbnail sketch of his version of "The Art of the Deal."

“I could tell you, it will start with Howard feeling that he is working too hard and doing too many shows and not making enough money. Our side would say, 'We want you to do more, and get less money,'” Karmazin said.

I asked ABC TV chief Anne Sweeney at our Global Media Summit on Monday whether the nightly news broadcast will go away someday soon. Everyone who follows the broadcast TV business has wondered this at some time or another, particularly as fewer people tune in.

Here's a bit of that conversation, where I got Sweeney to firmly say... not much. If you're in a rush, the general message appears to be:

News is changing along with the changing times We believe in our news operation Budgets may change (likely for the worse), but news is worth paying for We're more than our evening news broadcast (where Charles Gibson is ceding the anchor slot to Diane Sawyer), but we're not going to say one way or the other whether we'll keep it going. Me: News operation is often a big cost. Some say that evening news is losing its relevance as people get their news elsewhere. Is it possible that ABC would get rid of its evening newscast?

Sweeney: I think world news is not just about 6:30. I think World News is about being ready to provide the news whenever it happens. It's not just limited to that half hour. It's actually on all day. The ABC broadcast day opens, the network day opens with Good Morning America. ...  So we always have the ability to come in with breaking news. ... And then shows like 20/20 provide us with an opportunity to go a bit broader. And then of course there's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, which gives us the Washington beat, which again can appear in the other shows throughout the week. So it's really a manner of managing the assets rather than focusing on (the 6:30 news)

When I went to college in 1991, I begged my parents to buy me a small television for my dorm room (They wouldn't let me work during my first year of college, so I had no money). How things have changed in 18 years!

I learned how much they changed at the first day of the Reuters Global Media Summit. Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, was talking to us about how quickly the Internet and mobile technology are changing the way that we look at news and entertainment. That led to her divertimento into campus life:

You come to realize very quickly that all these platforms are very different. Sometimes they're being used or accessed by different demographics.