Oprah to Quit?!

Update: Harpo states that Oprah has yet to decide whether she will end her show after the 2011 season:

In a statement issued this afternoon, however, Harpo responded: “While David Zaslav’s comments are true that Oprah’s current contract to produce The Oprah Winfrey Show will expire in 2011, she has not made a final decision as to whether she will continue her show in syndication beyond that,” says Lisa Halliday, chief spokesperson for Harpo Productions, Inc.
In fact, a clause existed in her current contract that would have let the talk-show queen end the show in 2010, but she recently chose to extend the show’s run through the contract’s full term.

Original Post: Oprah Winfrey will take her blockbuster talk show out of broadcast syndication and move it to her own cable channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network, by 2011, it was revealed in the Discovery Channel’s earnings call Friday morning.

Broadcasting & Cable’s Paige Albiniak reports that Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced the impending switch Friday morning, which is news inasmuch as Winfrey had previously announced she would be ending the show when its syndication deal ran out:

“The current expectation is that after fall 2011 her show will go off of … syndication, and she will come to OWN,” the cable network that Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, is creating in conjunction with Discovery.

“We are talking right now about what that presence would be and what programming she would be involved in directly, but this is her chapter two, and building the OWN brand online and on-air is something and she and I are working on together. It is a core mission for her,” Zaslav said.

- from Huffpost