“If I lost control of the business, I’d lose myself–or at least the ability to be myself. Owning myself is a way to be myself.”

–Oprah Winfrey, in “The Business of Being Oprah,” a 2002 cover story that I wrote about the billionaire media titan. Back then, Oprah was figuring out who she wanted to be, beyond a daytime talk-show host. She had recently (and warily) formed a partnership with Hearst–from which O magazine was born. But she’d rejected every and all offers to license her name for big money. Having been abused as a child, control meant everything to her, she told me.

And it still does. But now she’s taking a giant step, announcing on the air today that she’ll leave ABC (DIS) after the next TV season, her 25th, to move to cable. Her start-up, OWN, is a 50-50 venture with Discovery Communications (DISCA). “Twenty five years feels right in my bones, and it feels right in my spirit,” she said, fighting tears, at the end of her program this afternoon.

For more on Oprah’s new network, read “Behind Oprah’s next big move,” posted earlier today. And catch me with Anderson Cooper tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern on CNN’s AC 360.

by Patricia Sellers

Now that Oprah Winfrey is talking about her life-changing moves–to cable from broadcast TV and to Los Angeles from Chicago–I have to say: I’m not surprised at all.

After all, Oprah, who says she’ll end her daytime show on ABC (DIS) in September 2011, does things only one way: with her full self in the game.

What I know for sure (and she does too): Building a major cable network will take all of the most popular woman on TV.

When I spoke with Winfrey a year ago (on the afternoon of Election Day 2008, when she was flying high as Barack Obama was hours away from winning the Presidency), she told me about her plans to go into cable. We were talking because I was profiling Tom Freston, the former CEO of Viacom (VIAB), whom she had chased around the world–literally–trying to lure the peripatetic corporate refugee to run Harpo, her media conglomerate.

Winfrey, 55, didn’t persuade Freston to become her CEO. But she did bring him on as a consultant to OWN, the cable network about empowerment and life purpose that she’s now in the throes of developing. “I believe in signs,” Winfrey told me that day, going on to explain how David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery Communications (DISCA), first lured her to think about moving from broadcast to cable. Visiting her at her Harpo office in Chicago in May 2007, Zaslav said to her: “Today, there’s MTV and CNN and Discovery and a few brands that will impact people in years ahead.”

Zaslav, a former NBC Universal (GE) executive who was aiming to build his own legacy at Discovery, asked Winfrey to think about owning her own TV platform as a way to extend her presence after she’s no longer here physically.

The “sign” Oprah saw? She grabbed Zaslav’s hand, led him to her desk, and pulled a piece of paper from her drawer. On the piece of paper, she had written a note to herself, years earlier, plotting her own TV network: OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network. This was the same name as Zaslav was suggesting she call her new channel.

And so it is OWN–a Los-Angeles-based venture that’s been marked by repeated launch delays. In February, when I did the Freston story, the target date was early 2010; now it’s January 2011.

Developing a new major network is no easy task. But OWN is taking over the prime TV “real estate” of Discovery Health, which will put it in 70 million homes at its start. That’s a huge help. Still, it isn’t as big a plus as OWN’s No.1 asset: Oprah herself.

by Patricia Sellers

I told you that NBC Universal (GE) is decorating its “Green is Universal” eco-campaign this week with a strange but cool art project inside 30 Rock. An environmental muralist named Tom Deininger spent all afternoon yesterday inside Studio 8H–the home of Saturday Night Live–with 300-plus inner-city school kids and NBC staffers building a massive wall relief completely out of trash.

That’s right. 100% garbage. Used cue cards from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Old cassette tapes from NBC Sports. Junked CDs and DVDs.

I told you I’d share what these oddball artists created–and here you go.

The mega-mural is based on a photo called Aspen Groves by the late,  great Ansel Adams. NBCU hasn’t decided where they’ll put the mural on public display. But it’ll likely be a public school or community space somewhere in New York City. Any takers?

“Young is better than old,
Pretty is better than ugly,
Rich is better than poor,
T.V. is better than music,
Music is better than movies,
Movies are better than sports,
Anything is better than politics,
And nothing is better than the celebrity dead.”

–Stolley’s Law of Covers, created by Dick Stolley, senior editorial advisor to Time Inc., and founding editor, People. A legend of the magazine world, he made history when he secured the rights the Zapruder footage immediately following JFK’s assassination.

In a Q&A emailed to Time Inc. employees today, Stolley included an addendum to his law: “Obama has changed the “anything is better than politics” rule, but that won’t last forever.” Unfortunately 2009 offered too much proof of his rule about celebrity deaths. For more from Stolley, check out this photo gallery at Life.com where he shares some favorite photos from his years working at LIFE. –Jessica Shambora

While the top execs at NBC Universal (GE) are consumed with closing their deal to merge into Comcast (CMCSA), they’ve found a little time to do some good for the planet. You can’t miss this week’s “Green is Universal” campaign if you watch CNBC (featuring Green Stocks to Watch) or the Tonight Show (Jay Leno races eco-friendly cars in the Ford (F) Green Car Challenge) or Top Chef, where the focus tonight is on organic and sustainable ingredients.

On Law & Order: SVU, they even make a big deal of switching to energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m not kidding.

While this eco-effort on screen gets pretty silly, there’s a cool thing happening today inside NBCU–at Studio 8H, the home of Saturday Night Live. An environmental artist named Tom Deininger and a bunch of New York City middle-school students are building a massive mural out of trash that’s re-purposed, recycled, or reclaimed from all around the company.

Measuring 8×36 feet, this is bona-fide TV trash: cue cards from Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, thousands of discarded CDs and DVDs, hundreds of NBC Sports tape cassettes.

I know about Deininger because he built one of his eco-murals out of 100% trash at Brainstorm Green, Fortune’s confab last April. (Lonnie Lardner, a onetime TV news reporter whose Los Angeles-based firm Creative Voltage brought Deininger to Brainstorm Green, also works on art installations for the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.) Here’s a shot of Deininger at work:

Photo courtesy of Rob Dunn

Deininger and the kids are supposed to finish their organized chaos at NBCU at 5pm today. Once it’s done, we’ll post a picture here on Postcards.

“‘Unfriend’ has real lex-appeal.”

– Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for the Oxford University Press’s U.S. dictionary program. Today The New Oxford American Dictionary revealed that ‘unfriend’ is the 2009 word of the year. If you’ve got a Facebook profile, you’ve likely unfriended some annoying person in your network. Someone may have even (gasp) unfriended you!

There were lots of tech-isms in the running this year–paywall, netbook, sexting. One tech trend actually spawned its own mini-lexicon, but no news about the official acceptance of those terms outside the Tweetaholics and Twitterati! –Jessica Shambora

by Jessica Shambora

Watch out, geeks. You’ve got company.

Yes, Best Buy’s (BBY) Geek Squad, whose “agents” drive those Volkswagen Beetles to the homes of customers in technology distress, has competition to contend with: digital troubleshooters who aid consumers via the Internet.

Even as these forces are expanding, it’s hard to detect them. For instance, the “solution engineers” of Support.com (SPRT)’s are almost impossible to spot since they work via remote-access subterfuge. Once a troubled tech user downloads Support.com’s software, an engineer can access the computer via the Internet to diagnose and fix problems.

Ever stealthy, Support.com’s engineers even go undercover as technicians for companies like Staples (SPLS) and Sony. You’ve seen Office Depot (ODP)’s Tech Depot Services? These friendly folks are actually Support.com’s hired guns.

Perhaps you’re lucky enough to never have needed consumer tech support. (If that’s the case, either you don’t own a computer, or you own a Mac). But there’s no escaping that our lives are getting more digital every day. And even as we become more tech-savvy and as tech providers improve design and user interfaces, there will always be bugs, malfunctions, spyware and viruses.

There will be updates and upgrades. New platforms and devices to install. Compatibility issues to iron out. Who ya gonna call?

For hardware problems, you can go to your device manufacturer. But let’s face it, these days it’s all about operating systems, platforms and software: Google’s (GOOG) Chrome and Android, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7, Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes, Adobe’s (ADBE) AIR.

So while the Geek Squad has been the most visible source of help (and no wonder, given the marketing muscle of Best Buy), it’s not the cheapest option. Nor the most convenient. Rivals are gaining ground as many consumers no longer need a technician to hold their hand–or simply don’t have time to schedule an appointment with a Geek.

Support.com hasn’t done well as a stock, in part because it only recently switched from serving enterprises to targeting consumers. Other options include startups like PlumChoice and iYogi. Meanwhile, phone companies are also getting in the game. Support.com CEO Josh Pickus says that Verizon (VZ), Dell (DELL), AT&T (ATT), and Wal-Mart (WMT) are all “poking around in this space.”

For more about this hot industry, check out my profile of Support.com on Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech site.

Note: Geek Squad offers tech support remotely through a partnership with SupportSpace, which offers services similar to Support.com.

“As every Iditarod musher knows, if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.”

– Sarah Palin, in Going Rogue. Yep, she’s ambitious–and No. 1 on Amazon.com.

Guest Post by Sharon Meers, co-author of Getting to 50/50

Photo courtesy of Vince Tarry

Do men resent powerful women?

One of the most intriguing statistics in “A Woman’s Nation,” the recently released survey by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, is this: 69% of women think men resent women who have more power than they do. Only 49% of men agree.

Who knows who’s right. What we know for sure is that men and women can’t agree about power–and aren’t very comfortable talking candidly about it.

To research Getting to 50/50, the book I wrote with Joanna Strober, we found that fear of candid talk is the biggest logjam blocking the progress of women in the workplace. For one thing, men shy away from giving women honest feedback. One male CEO of a tech start-up told us: “Every senior male executive I know has been threatened with discrimination charges regardless of the goodness of their track record.” He added, “I’ve seen it make cynics out of a lot of men who started out very differently.”

All of us–men and women alike–contribute to this problem. In our politically correct workplaces, discussing male/female differences has become so taboo that the topic is broached only in heated moments, when colleagues let loose their true opinions about gender and power.

It’s a messy management issue. HR lawyers say that employers ask how to avoid suits when their priority should be retaining and promoting women, with the help of honest dialogue about everything from performance issues to maternity leaves.

But too often, men cower at giving feedback to female subordinates. That CEO of the tech start-up confessed that when he was at a big media company, his peers advised him to leave his office door open during reviews of female employees–and best to stay within earshot of his assistant so he’d have a witness if the employee made a complaint. “How much candor can you offer with your door open?” he asked me rhetorically, with understandable exasperation.

Moreover, lots of line managers keep women out of their networks (and even avoid going out to lunch with them) because it just doesn’t feel comfortable. Many managers steer clear of difficult conversations. Don’t be too hard on the guys: They’ve never been told how to engage the right way.

Rod Kramer, a professor and management expert at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, believes that men’s discomfort relates to a common insecurity: “Men often seem to think (heroically) that they should be masters at the conversation–that they should know the ‘right’ things to say.” His advice to men and women: “Be more curious about each other and their experiences. Just ask good leading questions–and invite questions in return.”

Meanwhile, women’s tendency to be super-serious (as men perceive them, at least) compounds the workplace dysfunction. “Women can make anything a chore,” a former Microsoft (MSFT) executive told me. “They’re too serious and don’t seem to understand that work is a game.”

What should women do? One of our interviewees, Larry, a partner in a national architecture firm, told us about a woman who blew up over her male colleagues’ risqué pin-ups and jocular behavior; she complained to HR and quit. Larry wishes that she had confronted the guys who offended her: “Tell guys to their face,” he says, advising women in general. “Say, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ And be funny about it. You have to do it in a way so that guys don’t feel threatened, but you are making your point.”

In the stories we heard, “right” and “wrong” were rarely obvious. But the need for a male/female lingua franca was clear.

Some wise employers are getting a jump on inventing this new language.

Deloitte, for one, has moved aggressively to bring male and female executives together to discuss questions like “Would you want your daughter to work for a company that has lower expectations for women?” Open dialogue and better insight into what women need to be successful has helped Deloitte command a lead among professional services firms in utilizing female talent.

The University of Michigan has also made strides. With backing from the National Science Foundation, the University enlisted male professors to comb research on implicit gender attitudes. For example, most people will select a resume with a male name over one with a female name, even when the resumes are identical. Professors turned their survey into a workshop and shared their insights with the University’s hiring committees. Female science hires have since risen dramatically.

It may be a long while ’til we reach 50/50. But understanding the issues and learning to understand each other is a good start.

Sharon Meers is the co-author of Getting to 50/50 and a former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs (GS).

“The hair is 75 percent of my performance.”

– Actor Robert Pattinson, who stars as vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen in the screen version of the literary sensation, Twilight. In a Q&A in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, Pattinson says that for New Moon, the franchise’s second installment, he told the filmmakers, “Listen, I need to tone down the hair. Let’s make it a little more real, a little bit more…Method.”

Pattison’s not the only one who understands the power of hair. Pattie has also written about the speculation over how business leaders part their tresses. You can check out Pattinson’s “do” when New Moon hits theaters next Friday. –Jessica Shambora