Two women's networks are undergoing management changes, as
the executive exodus continued at Lifetime Television and Oxygen Media lost a programming
official.
Bill Padalino, senior vice president of Lifetime, will be
leaving the network within the next 30 days. And Debbie Myers, Oxygen's vice president of
programming and development, has left that fledgling women's network, which Geraldine
Laybourne is launching in February.
Padalino, who had been at Lifetime since it debuted in
1984, will be the fourth top-level official to exit the network in the past few weeks, as
new president Carole Black continues her housecleaning.
Executive vice president Jane Tollinger, vice president of
research Barry Kresch and vice president of marketing Mary Pat Ryan already left. No
replacements were named.
Myers came to Oxygen from E! Entertainment Television,
where she helped to develop such hit shows as Talk Soup.
While Lifetime is fully distributed with 73 million
subscribers, it still needs a strong affiliate-sales chief to get carriage for its
fledgling digital service, Lifetime Movie Network.
LMN, which debuted a year ago, is now in only 3 million
homes, and it expects to be in 5 million by the end of the year. Black is reportedly
looking to reposition LMN and upgrade it.
Lifetime has other problems on the affiliate-sales side:
Several sources said its rate card to larger MSOs is low, so the network isn't generating
the kind of license fees it should at this juncture.
A Lifetime spokeswoman said the network doesn't comment on
personnel changes. Oxygen declined to comment on Myers' departure. Padalino and Myers
couldn't be reached for comment.
