Thinking Inside theBox

Geraldine Laybourne sweeps into a small conference room at the headquarters of Oxygen Media to watch a focus group getting under way one floor below. Most of Laybourne's employees at Oxygen, the four-and-a-half-year-old cable TV channel for women, have left for the day, and the usually bustling office -- located on three stories of a converted Nabisco factory in Manhattan's Chelsea district -- is quiet. Laybourne has been looking forward to this focus group, which she commissioned to gauge the interest of women in some kind of election-season special, an idea that is dear to her heart. Leading the discussion is Karen Ramspacher, a head of research at Oxygen, who sets the group at ease with friendly introductions and banter about everyone's favorite television shows.

Laybourne sits upstairs, watching the roundtable group via closed-circuit television. She happily munches popcorn while Ramspacher breaks the ice, offering soda to the seven participants and reminding them that pizza's on the way. She starts off by asking them to describe their jobs and name their favorite TV shows. "The OC," says Whitney, a 22-year-old college student. "Yeah," the other women agree enthusiastically. "American Idol," says Anna, a stay-at-home mother. "Reality TV...every one of them," says Trisha, a fifth-grade teacher from New Jersey, adding that she has two televisions right next to each other so she doesn't miss anything.

After the introductions, Ramspacher wades into more serious subject matter. "Where do you guys get your news from?" she asks. The women, all between the ages of 19 and 28, are here because, during a screening process, they expressed apathy toward politics. They fidget nervously in their seats. The schoolteacher reads the Bergen Record, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News. "I don't read them for politics," she says. "I read them for Page Six [the Post's gossip section], that's about it." Her students receive copies of The New York Times every day, she mentions later -- but she doesn't encourage them to read it; she uses it to cover the tables when they paint.

Switching gears, Ramspacher asks the group how political content could be presented in a more interesting way. "CliffsNotes," jokes the student. Before long, two pizzas arrive, and Ramspacher asks the women to write down ways they could make their opinions known to politicians. Nobody mentions voting.

Laybourne -- who three years ago spearheaded a media campaign encouraging women to run for political office -- is determined to pique the women's interest. She scribbles a note to Ramspacher, telling her to ask the women how they would react if politicians started talking about drafting young women, along with young men, for military service. As the women dig into their pizza, Laybourne checks her watch. She's late for another event. She slips out of the room and heads downstairs, handing Ramspacher the note before walking past the front desk to the elevator.

As they say at the network: Oh! These are good days, at last, for Oxygen. Viewership is way up, and nearly five years after launching its TV channel, the company recently reported its first quarterly profit. But that certainly isn't the result of trying to make better citizens of young women. It's more a matter of ceasing to do so -- via a business plan succinctly expressed by the show, and maybe just the title, Girls Behaving Badly. Is Laybourne, a schoolteacher turned TV exec turned TV entrepreneur, still struggling against that? For all her successes as a builder of hit shows and profitable cable channels, she has shown a persistent inclination toward wishful thinking about her audiences. Her high-mindedness (in TV terms, at least) is sometimes out of sync with the taste of her target audience -- which at Oxygen is women between 18 and 49 years of age -- and it's sometimes tripped her up. Laybourne is one entrepreneur who sometimes needs to be reminded to think inside the box.

When Laybourne formed Oxygen Media in 1998, the Lifetime Network had already been around for more than a decade and was the established leader in the women's category. But Laybourne wanted to challenge female viewers with a funnier, more sophisticated alternative to tearjerkers and stalker movies -- she was interested in what she often calls "smart fun." On an early program called Pure Oxygen, for example, she served up Maya Angelou reading poetry. On Exhale, Candace Bergen interviewed distinguished guests like Hillary Rodham Clinton and architect Frank Gehry in what Bergen once described as "mini courses." Laybourne was also determined to succeed at another first by linking the Oxygen television channel to the Internet, creating a kind of interactive megaportal chock-full of great information for women.

After launching its TV channel in early 2000, Oxygen had a hard time getting picked up by cable providers in major cities, and during that year its ambitious Web operation nearly collapsed. Laybourne is not the kind of person who refuses to acknowledge mistakes. "I was totally wrong about how we would get to smart fun," she says. "I thought it would be through the Internet." She blames the website debacle partly on the bankers who advised her. "They said, 'Build it and they will come," she recalls. Anyway, she observes, she never would have gotten so much seed money without the Internet component. "Like everything in life," she says, "it's been a blessing and a curse."

Laybourne describes the past few years as messy but instructive. "You learn a hell of a lot more from a mistake than an early success," she maintains. True, but, as she is starting to find out, success is a lot more fun. Last year, things finally started looking up. In December, the channel reached its original goal of being offered in 50 million of America's 80 million cable-watching homes by 2004. The network finally has a big presence in its hometown. Advertisers are taking notice. Now the trick is getting viewers to tune in.

By the time she founded Oxygen in the late 1990s, Laybourne was a superstar, best known for transforming the Nickelodeon network into must-see TV for kids. In that position, too, it took her a while to come down to the level of her audience. She offered up serious fare like a show about kids' dreams (think Pure Oxygen for eight-year-olds). After seven years of struggle, she came up with a hit. Through extensive research, including focus groups with children, Laybourne and her team discovered that kids loved game shows, from Wheel of Fortune to The Newlywed Game. So they created a game show for kids and by kids. Double Dare, which premiered in 1986, starred armor-clad children racing through obstacle courses and getting covered in green slime. It was brilliant, a vivid contrast to typical product-driven cartoons like My Little Pony and Gummi Bears. It was different, it was new, and it was what kids wanted. Laybourne soon solidified her standing with the launch of Nick at Nite and other hits like Rugrats, a cartoon about a ragtag group of kids out to unravel the mysteries of life, like where the light goes when the refrigerator door is closed.