An American institution for a half-century, the country’s largest selling weekly, is dying.
They’re calling it a relaunch, a transformation. But don’t believe ’em.
No, the new-look TV Guide, announced today and hitting the stands in October, sounds all-too-eerily reminiscent of when Laverne & Shirley moved to LA, or when Mike Douglas moved to LA, or when the Moonlighting kids “did it,” or when All in the Family replaced Mike and Gloria with a cloying little girl.
Yes, TV Guide is jumping the shark.
The new mag will dump the 140 regional editions, making it useless as a reference for locally-produced or syndicated fare. What’s left of the listings section will be dramatically truncated, making it useless for future TV historians. Instead, it’ll be a regular-sized magazine (along the lines of its recently test-marketed Inside TV), full of big color pix and fawning celebrity puff pieces. As Rolling Stone has become a celeb-hype mag tangentally related to music, so will TV Guide become a celeb-hype mag tangentally related to TV.
Already, TV Guide Classic has shown signs of discomfort with itself, as best seen with all those multiple-cover gimmicks about theatrical movies that aren’t even on TV yet. And in an age of hundreds of national cable channels, a digest-sized database of thousands of shows is a monumental ongoing undertaking.
But without the local listings, it’s just not TV Guide anymore. And it’d take a monumental effort to re-create the national and local databases TV Guide‘s scrapping. Time Inc. tried in the ’80s with TV-Cable Week, but that was a massive money pit of a project that never got past test markets.
The only other way would be to start a print mag based on the newspaper-syndicate databases of TV listings (such as that of Tribune Media Services); but that’d compete with the newspapers that are the syndicate’s current customers.
Three and a half years before the FCC’s scheduled to turn off the original channels 2-13 (all current stations must migrate to digital UHF feeds before then), the “permanent” (i.e., print) medium that chronicled those channels is going away in all but name.
Here are further links to the story, from TV-biz analyst Phillip Swann, the blog site TV Squad, and entertainment historian Jerry Beck.
