Geraldine Layboume is chairwoman and chief execu­tive officer of Oxygen Media, a cable television/online network launched on February 2, 2000. She developed Oxygen after a two-year tenure in which she was in charge of Disney/ABC Television's cable operations. However, Laybourne gained her greatest renown for her work at Nickelodeon, a cable network targeted to children, where she was president until 1996. Laybourne was largely responsible for the overwhelming success the network achieved in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when Nickelodeon garnered a larger audience of child viewers than ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX, combined.

     Laybourne began her tenure at Nickelodeon in 1980. Her prior background featured stints in both education and children's television programming, experiences that would serve her well at Nickelodeon. She then joined her husband, Kit (a professional animator), as an independent producer of children's television programming. From this position she began, in 1979, to work with the new cable network Nickelodeon in the production of pilot programs. A year later she was named the company's program manager.

     During Nickelodeon's early years, Laybourne was instrumental in several key decisions that ultimately led to the network's long-term success. Nickelodeon came into being as a noncommercial program source created largely to serve as a goodwill tool through which cable system operators could win both franchise rights and subscribers. The company began to accept corporate underwriting in 1983 and became advertiser­ supported a year later. Although it continued to devote fewer minutes per hour to advertising than most cable or broadcast commercial program sources, the initial decision to accept advertising was extremely controversial. The end result of the decision, however, was that Nickelodeon became an extremely profitable operation.

     In 1985 Laybourne initiated the launch of the complementary evening service Nick at Nite, which breathed new life into old television series such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Get Smart, and Dragnet. Nick at Nite took series that had been syndicated for years and presented them in an original, tongue-in-cheek environment designed to create a unique program flow and to appeal to an affluent "baby boomer" audience. Nick thus expanded Nickelodeon's programming hours, widened the network's appeal to new audience segments, and ultimately led to the launch of another 24-hour program service from Nickelodeon called TV Land.

     With a number of accomplishments under her belt, Layboume was named president of Nickelodeon in 1989, and in 1992 she became vice chair of corporate parent MTV Networks (owned by Viacom). In these positions, Laybourne continued her efforts to build the brand equity of the Nickelodeon name. To this end, Nickelodeon opened its own production studio at Universal Orlando, Florida, theme park; it licensed consumer products to companies such as toy manufacturers Mattel and Hasbro; and it produced a magazine aimed at children, which regularly included a question-and-answer section with "The Boss Lady," as Laybourne came to be known by Nickelodeon's young viewers.

     Nickelodeon has also produced programs aired on outlets other than the cable network itself. For instance, its youth-oriented game show Double Dare was syndicated to broadcast stations, and its 1991 sitcom Hi Honey, I'm Home represented a cable landmark in that its episodes aired within the same week on both the cable network Nickelodeon and the broadcast network ABC. Such synergistic strategies became even more prevalent after Paramount Communications takeover of Viacom in 1994. For example, Nickelodeon played a central role in the cross-media promotional strategies Paramount employed leading up to the successful 1995 theatrical release of The Brady Bunch Movie, and Nickelodeon's popular Rugrats series became a Paramount feature film in 1998, with a sequel released in 2000.

     Under Laybourne's leadership, Nickelodeon grew from a fledgling, noncommercial programmer that existed largely to serve the cable industry's public image purposes, to a profitable and acclaimed program source that has become a core service in the channel lineups of virtually every U.S. cable system. In so doing, Laybourne became one of the foremost figures among cable television programmers, as well as one of the most influential women in the television industry. Her launch of Oxygen-with partners that include Oprah Winfrey, Microsoft co-founder and cable television magnate Paul Allen, and the Hollywood production team of Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, and Caryn Mandabach-represented an ambitious step to create a multimedia content provider targeted to women. Although Oxygen initially struggled, it nevertheless promised to present Laybourne with many opportunities to exercise her unique and prescient vision of tele­ vision's role in contemporary society.