Martha Stewart goes back to work after prison

NEW YORK - Lifestyle guru Martha Stewart has returned to work and told her cheering staff she would use lessons from her five months in prison to improve her company's products and reach a broader audience.

Slimmed down and clearly relishing her release, the smiling founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said the people she had met and her time to reflect behind bars had taught her the values of tradition, family, friendship and the comforts of home.

"We may not always have been clear in our message. Perhaps we focused too much on the 'how to' and not enough on the 'why,"' she said. She added, "Every parent who has made cookies for their children and has seen their children's gratitude in their faces knows that connection between doing and loving.

"We're going to engage and inspire new readers and new viewers to whom these topics may have seemed alien, unfamiliar or even, believe it or not, superficial," she said.

Stewart, 63, served five months for lying about a stock trade and now is serving five months of house arrest following her release on Friday. She is allowed to leave home for 48 hours each week to work.

"I love all of you from the bottom of my heart," Stewart told some 600 employees gathered at company headquarters. She choked back tears as she said: "I'm really glad to be home."

Despite her poignant words, her return had the feel of a political-campaign appearance, complete with piped-in triumphant music and risers of television crews and photographers jostling for their shots.

In a touch befitting Stewart, who built her business on domestic tips, a simple vase of daffodils graced the stage where she spoke. It was a far cry from the months Stewart walked grimly past the media into her trial in US District Court in Manhattan, looking drawn and heavy.

Having built a catering company into the media empire of lifestyle magazines, cookbooks and television shows, she was found guilty in March 2004 of conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of agency proceedings.

Now looking radiant, thinner and better-coiffed, Stewart wore a dark suit with a gold necklace; the electronic monitoring bracelet she must wear was not visible to the crowd of employees who gave her several standing ovations.

Stewart, who blew a kiss to them, faces quite a challenge at Omnimedia. Since 2001, just before her legal troubles became public, its revenue has fallen by about a third.

It posted its second consecutive loss last year, and advertisers have fled her flagship magazine, Martha Stewart Living. Shares of Stewart's company more than doubled when she was in prison, but analysts considered them much too high given the company's woes. Since her release, shares are down about 17 per cent and closed at US$27.97 on Monday.

"What's happened since her release is that people are starting to take a harder look at what the real prospects of the company are," said Gary McDaniel, a Standard & Poor's stock analyst.

Stewart is planning a new television show, "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart," a spin-off of the popular Donald Trump reality TV show and a new daytime cooking and lifestyle TV show.

Except to mention the women she met and admired at the Alderson, West Virginia prison known as "Camp Cupcake," Stewart made only oblique references to her time behind bars.

"Pride in homekeeping creates serenity and pleasure," she said at one point. "I even experienced it standing around the microwave in the place where I was staying."

- REUTERS