…is here, and, like we predicted, it’s a fiasco that has more in common with the dorkier industry-friendly gossip rags than with the great video bible of yore.

Ex-staffer Jeff Jarvis, noting that the mag’s also slashing its circulation “base rate” (the rate guaranteed to advertisers) from 9 million to 3 million (it peaked at 19 million in 1974), calls the relaunch “the incredible shrinking magazine.” He also calls it “the official end of the mass market,” with the print media’s one everything-for-everybody holdout reinventing itself as a niche product.

OK, I can deal with that. But if so, then the new TV Guide ought to be a niche product targeting people who really like watching TV, and want more info about what they’re watching than they can get in a standard gossip mag or a daily paper’s entertainment section. A TV Guide that’s scrapped its local listings had better make up for it by adding reviews, analysis, and background info.

The new TV Guide doesn’t do that, at least not yet. It presumes its typical reader to be a celebrity-obsessed, attention-span-challenged “vidiot.” It offers this mythical reader nearly 60 pages of breezy, show-bizzy material for which “fluff” would be too good a term, coupled with 18 pages of listing grids so nationalized and generalized as to be near-worthless. (There are no weekend daytime listings; weekday daytime and late-night grids are full of “various programming” and “local programming” disclaimers.)

With just a little effort, this could be improved. The articles could be at least as intelligent as they were in the magazine’s golden age under founder (and Nixon crony) Walter Annenberg. The listings could be brought back up to a useable level of completeness, and could be put out in Central and Mountain time-zone versions instead of just Eastern and Pacific. The local listings could be brought back in vestigial form, as an eight- to twelve-page newsprint insert stapled into the middle.

In short, it could be much more like TV Guide Ultimate Cable, a short-lived test-marketed revamp of the mag from the mid-’90s.

Or, let someone else do the job. The new TV Guide, in dumping its costly programming-database costs, has lowered the bar toward potential competition. Let’s get another TV mag out there, one that gives a damn about viewers/readers who give a damn.

As some of you know, I’m in the midst of writing a book to be sold exclusively online, Take Control of Digital TV. It’s intended for readers who know about computers but don’t know about television, particularly the new hi-def generation of TV gear. As part of the research, I’m currently watching the DVD Digital Video Essentials, a way-comprehensive guide to installing and adjusting medium- to high-end video gear. The HDTV and home-theater subculture is audiophile geekiness cubed (at least).

TV has become high-attention, long-attention-span material. A print mag that wants to keep calling itself the authority on the field ought to be becoming smarter, not dumber.

Immediately after the new Belltown Messenger came out, I buried myself into a freelance project that won’t see the bright light o’ day for another month. So here are some of the things that have happened this past week or so:

RONNIE BARKER, RIP: In the early ’80s, during one of my many long-term bouts with chronic depression, I became utterly fond of the Two Ronnies sketch comedy show, which KING-TV had picked up (yes, a BBC show airing an American commercial station, albeit at 2:30 a.m. or some such.) The station had just introduced 24-hour telecasting (the first in Seattle to do so), filling up the wee hours with moldie-oldie movies, repeats of the 11 p.m. news, and BBC imports brought over here by Time-Life Television. The Two Ronnies was the best of this motley schedule. It featured cute skits, whimsical monologue stories by Barker’s partner Ronnie Corbett, and fake news bits aqt the beginning and end that relied on time-tested comedy shticks and wordplay rather than anything “topical.” Barker was a genius. And now, as he would say, “It’s goodnight from him.”

AUGUST WILSON, RIP: With the beloved playwright’s demise, Rebecca Wells now ascends to the niche title of the best writer living in Seattle who never writes about Seattle.

STRIP UPDATE: Because a judge stopped ’em from maintaining a permanent “temporary moratorium” on new adult entertainment clubs, the Seattle City Council adopted a draconian set of restrictions on how they can operate. Like the late, unlamented Teen Dance Ordinance of the mid-’90s, this is a not-so-thinly disguised attempt to harass an unwanted entertainment genre into nonexistence. A Reuters dispatch claimed the move was ironic in the face of Seattle’s “liberal,” “tolerant” reputation.

I could’ve told ’em different.

What the nation sees as our supposed blue-state radicalism is really baby-boomer smugness; i.e., just another kind of conservatism. We’re a city whose sociocultural establishment thinks glass bowls are “art” and easy-listening sax solos are “jazz.” We’re a city that loves “diversity,” as long as it’s limited to upscale white women, upscale white gays, and dead black musicians.

We’re a city that only tolerates sex if that scary-sticky-gooey topic can be subsumed under a more acceptable rubric such as individual “empowerment.” So we embrace a certain peep-show parlor where a thick glass curtain keeps the genders neatly apart; but an establishment where women and (gasp!) men could share the same space, even (shudder!) touch one another? Must be stopped!

At least there’s some solace that four City Council members bravely voted against the ban-in-all-but-name, and that affected entrepreneurs are already planning to take the city to court.

Entire generations will grow up never having learned the phrase “Be Kind, Rewind.”

…music videos, mommy?

…in the once-hoppin’ town of Kansas City, our favorite TV critic Aaron Barnhart thinks Wired magazine’s “TV of Tomorrow” issue doesn’t go far enough. Barnhart foresees a TV that’s not just from NY/LA/SF anymore: “…It’s not a stretch to imagine high-quality drama and comedy shows someday originating from St. Paul or Cleveland or Dallas or … or … Kansas City.”

All three of the stalwart network news anchors of the modern era have now left their posts; two by retirement, one by more drastic means.

…for that glorious only-in-Seattle institution, the hydroplane races. (Other cities host the boats, but no other city loves ’em as much.)

As I’d predicted for several years now, the Miss Budweiser team’s dissolution has meant a far more level playing field for the other boats. Of the eleven official entrants, at least six had a reasonable chance of winning the whole thang. It’s so good to see a sport “dominated” by such sponsors as Llumar Window Film, Lakeridge Paving, and E-Lam Plus (whatever the heck that is).

And kudos to KIRO for airing the whole event in HD, or at least in upconverted widescreen.

…an end to those increasingly annoying screen-corner channel logos.

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.

The Vancouver native and D-Day veteran will be known forever as Scotty on the original Star Trek and the first seven Trek movies. He also vied with Tony Randall in that Viagra-era phemonenon known as elderly celeb fatherhood, having sired his last kid at age 80 (five years ago).

As the Enterprise’s chief engineer and transporter jockey, Doohan was the voice and face of imagined 24th-century high tech. How appropriate/ironic/whatever that his final home was in Redmond, the suburb whose name means technology in today’s world.

Joe Guppy, one of the founding cast members of KING-TV’s lamented comedy show Almost Live!, is now a shrink, and has some notes of caution to strike about today’s test-score obsession in the schools.

You think you know the brutal results of abject paranoia? Wait ’til you read about some of the potential anti-copying schemes on next-generation DVDs!

The above-linked piece is partly based on real rumors and partly on wild speculation; this follow-up attempts to clarify, but only makes matters worse, as the author acknowledges one of the Hollywood studios’ worst rumored schemes might be true. (Said scheme would limit the types of output plugs on new DVD players, so that many existing TVs wouldn’t be able to hook up to them.)

Current TV, the quasi-news cable channel being funded by Al Gore and friends, still hasn’t begun cablecasting, but it does have a website with a FAQ list. It’s not very clear about just what the programming will be, except that it will be short on breaking news and big on “short video segments–each just two to five minutes long–with recurring themes and styles.”

Haven’t these guys heard about the Long Attention Span Generation? The kids today don’t want little pre-digested chunks of info; they want engaging multithreaded storylines.

I’m not one of those kids, as you know. I happen to luv quick info-bytes. But what I like might not be what’s most marketable to my juniors.

The new Doctor Who ends its first season on CBC tonight. And wouldn’t you know it, but the show’s star Christopher Eccleston has aleady quit, which means the title role (recast six times in the original 1963-89 series) will be recast again. The new Doc will be the Scots actor David Tennant, whose credits include a recent BBC Casanova miniseries. Hmmm: A Scot with a time machine. Perhaps he could go back in time 16 years and warn the distilleries in his homeland about the current revival in, and shortage of, 16-year-old single malt Scotches.

As you recall, the Miss America Pageant had been indefinitely delayed while organizers sought a new TV home. They’ve got one. They’re stepping down from the heights of ABC to the depths of Country Music Television. (Not even WE: Women’s Entertainment!) Oh, and there won’t be a pageant this year but in January ’06. And it might not even be in Atlantic City.