As Oprah Winfrey recalls it, she was struggling with whether her nationally syndicated talk show would or even could pull itself out of the muck that was enveloping daytime TV when she wrote a particularly ambitious yet prophetic journal entry.

She wrote on May 24, 1992, of wanting to leverage her top-rated program to fulfill her "vision of creating my own network" to teach people "to be all they can be in the world and living their best lives," Winfrey said Tuesday as she and Discovery Communications Chief Executive David Zaslav unveiled the fulfillment of that long-held dream.

OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network is set to make its debut in the second half of next year in 70 million homes on what is now the Discovery Health Network.

The multiplatform media venture, which will include the Oprah.com Web site, will be a 50-50 venture owned by Discovery and Winfrey's Harpo Productions, with Winfrey as its chairwoman and enjoying editorial control.

For Winfrey, one of the world's most powerful media moguls, whose Chicago-based empire already extends well beyond "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to include O magazine, the "Oprah & Friends" channel on XM Satellite Radio and a movie and television production company, this is more than a mere dream come true.

It is an opportunity to establish a legacy.

"The truth of the matter is one day the show has to end," Winfrey, who will turn 54 this month, said in a call with reporters. "That may be 2011 [when its current syndication deal expires] and that may be after 2011. ... This is an evolution of what I've been able to do every day. I will now have the opportunity to do that 24 hours a day on a platform that goes on forever.

"This network isn't just about me," she said. "It's using the voice and the brand and the vision, but it really is about creating possibilities for any number of people ... to extend the vision in a way that obviously I cannot 24 hours a day."

The new channel is being created through a cashless transaction. Winfrey's Harpo Productions will be responsible for OWN's programming, branding and creative vision. Discovery Communications' contribution will be its nine-year-old Discovery Health Channel, as well as distribution, origination and other operational requirements.

"There's no stronger brand in media than the Oprah brand," Zaslav said.

While OWN will launch in this country, as part of Discovery's portfolio that includes Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, Discovery Communications reaches 173 countries and Zaslav said he looks to take OWN global.

Until the end of her syndication deal, Winfrey cannot rerun episodes of her daytime show on the new channel. She has an option to end the program at the end of the 2009-10 TV season and her contract ends in 2011. She said she expects to decide this fall how long she wants to continue the show, seen locally weekdays at 9 a.m. and 11:05 p.m. on WLS-Ch. 7.

OWN offers her the opportunity, perhaps, to bid up her own price by providing a legitimate option. Or it could be a secondary outlet for her, much like her satellite radio channel, which is filled mostly with personalities she has nurtured on her TV show, such as Gayle King, design expert Nate Berkus, personal trainer Bob Greene and heart surgeon Mehmet Oz.

"Over the years, there's no one that's better at spotting talent and developing talent and, as chairman of this multimedia company, that's a big strength that we're going to lean on," Zaslav said.

Harpo programming

The new channel will have access to other programming from Harpo, which is producing reality shows for ABC as well as TV movies.

No decision has yet been made about where the new network will be based. First, Winfrey must choose a chief executive to handle day-to-day operations, someone who understands what she wants.

Winfrey was an original investor in the Oxygen cable channel, which launched in 1998 and was sold in October to NBC Universal for $925 million, but she eventually scaled back her involvement because, she said, "the channel did not reflect my voice."

Zaslav was moved to approach Winfrey after his wife gave him a copy of her O magazine.

He apparently won Winfrey over by professing he cared less about ratings than staying true to one's brand.

"Having spent the past 22 years, every day ... where your life is controlled by ratings, the idea of creating programming that's just really good for people allowing people to respond to it based upon the niche you're going to build for it was the most exciting thing I ever heard," Winfrey said.

It all goes back to that 1992 journal entry.

"I wrote that when I was going through the conflict of the Jerry Springers and everybody was going to trash TV, and I was trying to figure out for myself what I really wanted, in what direction I wanted to go," Winfrey said. "That's how I started thinking ... one day I'm going to have my own network so I can do it the way I want to do it."

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philrosenthal@tribune.com