By Jon Herskovitz
HENLEY ON KLIP, South Africa Jan 12 (Reuters) – Oprah
Winfrey feels a new freedom after leaving her wildly successful
daily TV talk show behind and taking a new course seeking
interviews with newsmakers on their own turf.
“I love the freedom of not being tethered to that chair and
having to do an interview based upon filling a quota on a number
of shows,” Winfrey told Reuters in South Africa, where she will
attend at the weekend the first graduation of high school
seniors from her Oprah Winfrey Leadership for Girls.
Less than a year after she ended “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in
May after 25 years on air, Winfrey launched the once a week
“Oprah’s Next Chapter” in January on her fledgling cable TV
channel OWN.
“When you have 200 shows a year to do, you do a lot of
things that you like and a lot of things you would, maybe, want
to pass on,” she said on Thursday.
Winfrey has interviewed Aerosmith leadman Steven Tyler for
the show and visited Sean Penn in Haiti to see what he is doing
to help relief efforts in the impoverished country trying to
rebuild from a devastating 2010 earthquake.
“Oprah’s Next Chapter” has brought the best ratings ever for
the Oprah Winfrey Network which has struggled to find an
audience. OWN said 1.6 million people watched Oprah chat last
Sunday with U.S. televangelist Joel Osteen — a 220 percent
increase on the audience in that time slot a year ago.
The show will soon take her to India, and China is also in
the cards.
“Part of this for me is getting to do exactly what I wanted
to do when I ended ‘The Oprah Show’.
Continued…
