Double the Fail: Oprah Teams With Arianna to Save Network

Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network is hemorrhaging money, and her popularity has yet to recover after her public embrace of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s race for the White House.

Fellow Obama backer Arianna Huffington’s much-balleyhooed deal with AOL hasn’t worked out as planned, with the Web leader’s influence getting trimmed back in recent weeks.

Now, the two media moguls are licking their wounds together as part of a new deal Deadline.com instantly branded as “desperate.”

The Huffington Post has teamed up with the Oprah Winfrey Network to introduce an Oprah Winfrey section in August, the companies said today.

Harpo Studios/George Burns Oprah Winfrey with some of the stars of OWN’s new ‘Six Little McGhees’ at the Discovery Communications upfront The Oprah Winfrey section will include content created and aggregated by writers and producers from OWN and Oprah.com specifically for The Huffington Post, covering topics such as personal growth, spirituality and health.

The Huffington Post already has pages with labels such as “Health News,” “Mindful Living,” “Religion,” “Health and Fitness” and “Becoming Fearless,” but hopes the Oprah brand, and supply of new content, will help attract more readers.

Deadline.com’s Nikki Finke snarked that the deal not only sounds desperate, but left unmentioned is the digital elephant in the room.

This pathetic pairing sounds to me like an ill-conceived partnership, and it’s interesting that no mention is made of AOL which bought HuffPo last year.

To be fair, the media giants are forced to compete in an age with a rickety economy and a leader who doesn’t fully embrace, or even understand, capitalism.