Television: Will Women Take A Breath Of Oxygen?

Geraldine Laybourne won kids over to Nickelodeon. Now she and some talented friends are launching a network for female viewers

When the embryonic women's cable channel/Web network Oxygen posted a preliminary TV schedule online last fall, the blurb for Trackers--a teen girl-power show, sans "sugar and spice"--asked, "What's a girl to do once she's outgrown Nickelodeon?"

Replace "girl" with "woman," and you have the question to which Oxygen chairwoman and CEO and former Nickelodeon president Geraldine Laybourne is unveiling the answer. During 15 years at Nick, Laybourne made a tiny kids' channel into an omnipresent part of youths' lives; in 1998, after an unsatisfying two-year stint at Disney/ABC, she was ready to strike out on her own. So what's an accomplished...

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