Prospect Park

UPDATE 10:46 PM ET: According to sources, Prospect Park does hold licensing rights to “GH” should ABC decide to cancel as reported by the Times. “The rights includes both online and broadcast rights,” is what we’ve since been told since our previous update.

PREVIOUS 9:39 PM ET: According to a report in The New York Times, highlighting tomorrow’s launch of “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” via Hulu, Hulu Plus and iTunes, the gold standard publication revealed that Prospect Park, the company behind the new “AMC” and “OLTL,” also holds the licensing rights to “General Hospital” in the event ABC decides to cancel the soap too!

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Photo Credit It Books, for HarperCollins Publishers

The New York Times Best Sellers list is out and Jeanne Cooper (Katherine Chancellor, “The Young and the Restless“), who released her memoir “Not Young, Still Restless” on Tuesday, July 31, can rest easy knowing her life’s work is a raving success.

“Still Restless” debuted at #25 in the Hardcover Nonfiction category of the August 19, 2012 edition of the Times list. The book was written by Cooper with Lindsay Harrison. It was released by It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Disney/ABC Television Group

As Soap Opera Network first reported on March 16, Deadline‘s Nellie Andreeva is reporting that ABC has officially canceled “The Revolution” and plans to slide “General Hospital” into the 2:00 PM ET/1:00 PM PT timeslot beginning Monday, September 10, the same day the network hands over the 3:00 PM ET/2:00 PM PT time period to affiliates. The news was later reported by The New York Times.

It was last week Wednesday (April 4, 2012) when Soap Opera Network Tweeted, via a very reliable source, that within ten days a decision on the future of “General Hospital” would be made by the network. Tomorrow, April 12 (or Saturday, April 14, depending on how you look at it), marks the one year anniversary of Black Thursday (April 14, 2011), which is best known to many as the day that ABC announced the cancellations of both “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” and the launches of “The Chew” and “The Revolution.” It was also the day Source Interlink announced a licensing deal with American Media over Soap Opera Digest and newly defunct Soap Opera Weekly.

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Source Interlink

(SoapOperaNetwork.com) — On Sunday, November 13, The New York Times reported that American Media, Inc., which earlier this year purchased the licensing rights of both Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly from owner Source Interlink, in which the company now oversees all aspects including editorial, advertising, marketing and distribution, would be launching a new weekly magazine dubbed Reality Weekly.

The magazine, which is set to launch in January 2012 with a newsstand price of $1.79 per issue, has long been expected. After all, reality TV related programming and “stars” have graced the covers of People and Entertainment Weeky, and even celebrity gossip mags Us Weekly, Star (which is owned by American Media) and Life & Style.  With coveted supermarket placing between both Weekly and Digest, many often wondered if, along with dwindling audience for the soaps, American Media took over the mags just for their positioning and would shutter the mags in place of magazine’s such as Reality Weekly. Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Although I do not personally subscribe to either Digest or Weekly, it recently came to my attention that Soap Opera Weekly no longer provides subscriptions for soap fans wishing to receive their Weekly at home as it and numerous other magazines have done since their inceptions. This was later confirmed as the magazine no longer provides an online subscription via the Zinio magazine subscription and tablet application service. Digest and Soaps in Depth (both ABC and CBS editions) continue to provide subscriptions, however.

An American Media representative told Soap Opera Network “Absolutely not!” when asked if the launch of Reality Weekly had anything to do with the company’s decision to stop providing subscriptions for Weekly. “We made it a 100 percent newsstand mag that generates a million dollars of editda per year,” the rep continued. EDITDA stands for Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

In an industry plagued with erosion, it’s safe to say that at least our soap magazine’s appear to have more longevity than some of the soaps themselves.