I actually have a subscription to TV Guide (only because it was offered in a Frequent Flyer promotion…) and think the articles are an amusing way to spend a visit to the smallest room in the house.
But 75% of the weekly publication is worthless to me.
The listings provide me nothing that my cable box can’t give me. As digital technology advances, most homes will probably have the same type of cable guide offerings that those of us with digital cable and DVR subscriptions already enjoy.
Couple this with online opportunities, and TV Guide as a print publication has some real problems.
So, while I’m sure TV Guide will exist in some form (like the TV guide channel) because the Brand Name is so strong, I wonder how long the weekly magazine will exist?
Can they save it by making it more of an Enterainment Weekly sort of publication? More articles and less schedules?
I haven’t bought as issue since it was 99¢. My satellite guide goes forward about 9 days and TVGuide’s website goes ahead 2 weeks, so I don’t need it for scheduling. As for the stories, there’s always CNN and the IMDB daily news.
I had a subscription to TV Guide for at least 30 years but even I finally gave it up. A combination of factors, really. For one thing, before Rupert Murdoch bought it, TV Guide was a real magazine covering television seriously. It had articles about the business that no one else had. You had to read it to understand the tube.
Then it became a sheer fluff mag about the same time that cable television was really taking off. Both halves of the magazine - the articles and the listings - weren’t as exhaustive or as necessary. They tried a large format cable guide for a while but I think it was just a bit too early for the national audience, and it never really solved the basic problem of how to give useful info for hundreds of cable channels for a week while keeping it under the size of a phone book.
The last few years were destructive. They went down the same failing path as the comics industry: multiple covers for collectors, attention paid only to the biggest names, the same shows featured over and over, movies emphasized over TV shows. IOW, They tried to pander to their base which only drove off everyone else even faster.
It doesn’t have a future. It doesn’t even have a present.
I agree that it seems doomed as a print publication. There are too many channels in most digital cable or satellite systems for the printed table format. The onscreen program guide that comes with my digital cable service is far more useful (and it’s apparently from TV Guide). But I just checked the corporate website and found that the circulation is 9 million copies a week, which is a lot higher than I’d expect, and I think it used to be a lot higher that that. Oh, and Exapno Mapcase is right about it being a real magazine once. Does anyone remember its coverage of the dispute between Gen William Westmoreland and CBS?
One question, though. Who buys those custom covers I see at the checkout stand? (Collect all four Simpsons covers to make a picture!) Do people actually collect them?
I’ve had a subscription for years, but I didn’t renew it last month. The price goes up while they shear away content. They don’t give listings for the daytime at all now except for a grid. This isn’t so bad when it really is the same-old, same-old, but they did this even in December, so you had to go online to find out what Christmas specials there were…each issue has fewer pages. I stopped reading the articles about shows I liked about a year ago because I kept getting burned by spoilers…
If they shape up and go back to the magazine they once were, I think people would buy it for years to come. But at this point every “new!” format just brings more disapointment, so it seems as if they’re determined to dig their own graves.
It’s not going out of business, but it hopes to change itself so entirely that it might as well be a completely different magazine.
People are absolutely nuts about television, so a glossy magazine that concentrates just on tv may very well work. But keeping any listings may be a mistake. Who needs them if they aren’t localized?
Six million out of that nine million circulation are probably waiting forlornly next to TVs in hotel rooms across the country, to be touched only by housekeeping as they’re replaced each week.
In this age of 200+ channels, it is impossible to provide listings for all of them and not be so huge as to be impractical.
OTOH, their online version’s not much better. The last time I used it (at a hotel, oddly enough) it was painfully slow and it was challenging to find the right version of the choices (Am I in Cox Country? ATT Territory? Analog, Digital or Digital Rebuild?) I had fewer CHANNELS to pick from as a kid!
Actually none of those worked - the hotel had a customized DirecTV feed that required flipping between DirecTV listings and local broadcasts. It was actually easier to browse the paper version and then look for the channel number on the hotel’s reference card. Blech.
That’s how much it cost when I started delivering it. When it went up to a quarter, I lost 90% of my customers. I don’t think I’ve read one since the '80s. Now it’s the size of a Reader’s Digest and costs, what, about $2?
I did buy the George Harrison multiple covers, and the Elvis one with the CD attached. Other than those, I haven’t had a reason to look at a TV Guide in eons.
The one issue I routinely buy is the one that features capsules of the new fall schedule. I like to dig these issues out a couple of years later and see how many shows the writers correctly predicted would survive.
I’ve subscribed for years and watched sadly as it keeps going downhill. The new large format, IMHO, is sort of a cross between a checkout-counter tabloid and People Magazine. It may be of interest to teeny-boppers and star-struck younsters, but is a total mess as far as content, layout, design and helpful listings. It looks like a dog’s breakfast.
The stupid grids have taken over what has been the easiest way to find program since its inception, the listings by station within each time slot.
The grids do not even show the channel numbers any more, just the network, does not begin at 7:00 in my time zone although that’s when we usuall start watching, does not give any detailed info about the program any more, and has become useless to me. Although I live in a Mountain time zone, the issues I’ve rerceived are marked “Pacific time.” What are they thinking?
I just cancelled my subscription, and will look online from now on, saving a lot of trees and money to boot.
I remember when I was a kid, when TV Guide cost 15 cents! :eek:
Anyway. Dad subscribed to it, and I started subscribing to it when I moved to L.A. The good thing about it was that I could check any listing for any day of the week. I could fold a page to remind me when there was something I might want to watch.
But then it got bad. I don’t give a rodent’s rectum for celebrity gossip. I’d skip the articles. But the articles kept taking up more and more of the magazine. There were times I hated the fluff so much that I’d rip that section off and throw it away, leaving only the listings. And those ads for knick-knacs were really getting up my nose. I don’t care about stupid porcelaine stuatues of cute little kids, or a collection of miniature trains that just sit on a shelf, or a plate with some NASCAR guy on it. I’d often rip those ads out too, at the same time I’d dump those annoying ‘blow-in’ cards.
Finally they went to a grid system. Almost completely useless for finding things. Many is the time that I’d want to see if something was on, but it was not listed in the grid – and the hourly listings didn’t start until like 18:00 or so. Bloody useless. When I moved to Washington I let my subscription expire.
The cable menu only lets me check about a day ahead. After that everything is ‘to be announced’. Or if there is a listing of a show, there is no information for it. And sports? Forget it. With TV Guide I could find all of the soccer matches, car races, football games, etc. for the week simply by turning to the right page. With the cable menu I have to go to ‘Sports’ and search through each time slot to find out what’s playing. No such thing as planning ahead.
Still, the changes to TV Guide made it so useless that sports listings alone could not make up for them. I just use my cable menu and hope I find something good.
Since I’ve had a TiVo for years, I have no use for the actual program guide info in TV Guide. I only browsed it for the articles and show recomendations. The new format puts more into it of the things I like, but it’s still not something I’d pay for. Thankfully, I have a “comp” subscription…
I’m wit youse, man! You summed it up better than I did in my previous post. Oh, yeah, one other brilliant move in the new format is eliminating the VCR+ Codes. On top of the page they advise going online to get these. I’ll go online all right, for the whole kit and kaboodle!
