“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 broadcast TV after the next season, her 25th on air, 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 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.

Iranian voters

Uninsured Americans

Steve Jobs (AAPL)

Michelle Obama

Nancy Pelosi

Google (GOOG)

The Taliban

Warren Buffett (BRKA)

Last evening, I sat in the audience here at Manhattan’s Time & Life Building (where Fortune is based) and watched a bunch of brainy, well-connected people help Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel decide who should be Time’s 2009 Person of the Year. The list above belongs to Barbara Walters, who came prepared and kicked off a lively discussion. At a dinner party earlier this week, Walters explained to last night’s audience of editors and advertisers, she went around the table and asked each guest, “Who do you think will be Time’s Person of the Year?”

So it went last evening as Stengel asked his guests the same question. Rudy Giuliani–Time’s Person of the Year in 2001–brought his own list too. On the former New York mayor’s menu of possibilities: General David Petraeus, Derek Jeter, Rush Limbaugh, Ben Bernanke, Sonia Sotomayor, Nancy Pelosi.

Gayle King and Dr. Mehmet Oz had another idea entirely–not a person but rather, a thing: Twitter. Said King: “Twitter feels very 2009 to me.”

Maybe. Time ’s criteria for Person of the Year is whoever or whatever most affected the events of the year, for better or for worse. So, who (or what) is your No. 1 choice for Time’s 2009 Person of the Year?

by Patricia Sellers

The best stories of personal success defy the odds and the career rulebooks.

Paula Deen takes the cake.

The silver-haired, Southern-cookin’ star of the Food Network, has sold more than 8 million books. She’s got licensing deals with Wal-Mart (WMT) and other major companies. She has a magazine, Cooking with Paula Deen. And at 62, she has more fans on Facebook than Bill Clinton. And more followers on Twitter than David Bowie, Carson Daly, Tavis Smiley, and country star Martina McBride.

No one–and least of all Deen herself–could have imagined her success today. I interviewed Deen on stage last week at a “Fortune Most Powerful Women Evening With…” dinner, one in a series of regional events to accompany Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit. This “Evening With…” was in Atlanta and drew top women execs from Atlanta-based Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola (KO), Delta Airlines (DAL), Home Depot (HD), and UPS (UPS).

Best that Deen, who lives in Savannah, tell you her life story. Watch the video below. See what a hoot she is. And hear an extraordinary rags-to-riches tale.

I’ll give you a quick flavor, so to speak. Married to an alcoholic, broke, and agoraphobic for many years, Deen broke out of her personal prison 20 years ago, at 42. She started a tiny catering business with her two sons, and then a restaurant–funded by her Aunt Peggy, now 80 and ever spry. Aunt Peggy and Michael Groover, Deen’s second husband whom she married five years ago, were also with us last week to hear Paula pass on her entrepreneurial advice.

“I am living proof, y’all, that the American dream is still much in existence,” she told me on stage. “I’ve proven, you don’t have to be 30 years old. I have proven, you don’t have to be a size six. And I have proven that you don’t have to have blond hair.”

Hear it straight from Paula Deen–and enjoy…

Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne has joined the board of AOL–soon to be spun off from Time Warner (TWX).

Does Lyne love trouble, or what? Five years ago, after Martha Stewart began her five-month prison stint in West Virginia, Lyne stepped up from the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) board to be CEO of the company–and worked, eventually hand in hand with Martha, to rebuild the crippled company.

That was a slog (Lyne left last year), and so was her three-year stint on the board of CIT (CITGQ)–which she began in 2006 when it didn’t seem to be a terribly risky move. But it turned out to be. For the past few months, Lyne has had a seat at the table as CIT’s board and CEO Jeff Peek vied to save the company from bankruptcy. Peek failed. Lyne left the CIT board last week–one day before CIT filed Chapter 11.

So now Lyne is turning her attention to another once-mighty company that lost its way. AOL’s new CEO, Tim Armstrong, who joined from Google (GOOG) last March, is preparing for the spinoff from Time Warner by assembling a board that includes Procter & Gamble (PG) ex-global marketing chief Jim Stengel, former FCC chairman Michael Powell, tech investment banker Bill Hambrecht, and Jim Wiatt, who headed William Morris until he got squeezed out in a messy merger with talent agency Endeavor this year.

These people know pressure–and have their work cut out for them at the flagging web pioneer. Time Warner’s earnings report on Wednesday included news that AOL’s sales dropped 23% last quarter, while profits fell by half.

The good news for Lyne is that she has a positive story where, for her at least, it really counts: at Gilt Groupe. She joined the tiny purveyor of luxury goods last year, and it has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the Internet space.

by Patricia Sellers

Greetings from Atlanta. I’m here for Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women Evening With…” Atlanta is tonight’s stop in a series of regional dinners that we’re hosting annually in addition to the main event, the Most Powerful Women Summit. I’ll be interviewing Food Network star Paula Deen, the silver-haired, Southern-cookin’ entrepreneur and star of the Food Network. Also with us: the top women execs at companies like Coca-Cola (KO), Home Depot (HD), Delta Airlines, (DAL), UPS (UPS), and Turner Broadcasting, which is part of Fortune’s parent, Time Warner (TWX).

It’s fascinating to be here since I grew up, career-wise, learning about business from two Atlanta-based Fortune 500 giants: Home Depot, back in the ’80s and ’90s when co-founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were running the place, and Coca-Cola, when the late CEO Roberto Goizueta built Coke to be Fortune’s No. 1 Most Admired Company.

Isn’t it interesting that a false sense of invincibility and arrogance eventually poisoned both corporate cultures? Coke and Home Depot fell off the tracks, struggled through lines of wrong CEOs, and had their comeuppance. Only after painful cost-cutting and serious strategic rethinking did they begin to return to prominence.

I spent this morning at Coke with some folks who’ve been key to its recovery. One is SVP Wendy Clark, a hotshot marketer who joined Coke last year from AT&T (ATT) and this year made Fortune’s “Women to Watch” list in the Most Powerful Women issue. I also caught up with Clyde Tuggle, Coke’s global communications chief whom I’ve known since the ’80s, the Goizueta days.

Talking with Tuggle reminded me how radically marketing has changed. In May, he told me, he asked Coke’s social media experts to come up with “a big idea” that would be unique and turn consumers into brand marketers–what smart brand-owners must do today. The team delivered an idea called Expedition 206. It’s an online contest in which consumers vote, via Facebook and Twitter and other social networks, to elect a trio who will visit every country in the world where Coke sells its products. (Yes, Coke is in 206 countries.). Consumers have selected three finalist trios–who, if you look at the Expedition 206 site, you’ll see are from all around the world, literally. The winner will emerge in two weeks. Starting January 1, that trio will spend 365 days globetrotting “on a mission, quite simply, to find happiness,” as Tuggle puts it.

It’s a gimmick, but maybe a clever one in this new era when consumers, not companies, control public image.  “We have to move into a space where we let go,” as Tuggle says. “The world gets to experience the brand through the eyes of the consumer, not the company.”

Indeed, the consumer is now the chief marketing and communication officer.

Remember Gordon Gekko, Hollywood’s incarnation of greed the last time Wall Street was roundly despised? Twenty-three years ago, Fortune cut a deal with 20th Century Fox to have a mock magazine, with Gekko on the cover, appear in the Oliver Stone firm, Wall Street.

To this day, I gaze at this cover daily because it’s tacked to my office wall–as I told Gekko himself when he sat behind me during lunch today at Michael’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan. Well, the guy dining behind me was actually Michael Douglas, who won a Best Actor Oscar for playing that dastardly investor. As he and his stunning wife, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, and another couple rose from their table to leave, I leaned in and introduced myself. “I have to tell you,” I told Douglas, “I stare at you everyday because I have the Gordon Gekko Fortune cover on my wall right beside my computer.”

He laughed and said, “It’s on my wall too”–explaining that in the sequel to Wall Street, currently in production at 20th Century Fox (NWS), he’s reprising his role and the vintage Fortune cover hangs in Gekko’s apartment.

We can hardly wait. Andy Serwer, Fortune’s managing editor, makes a star turn–well, actually a cameo–too.