IIRC, by the 1990s Tallahassee was using the Gulf Coast edition of TV Guide.
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TV Guide editions and online resources
- Thread starter IM42A
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IIRC, by the 1990s Tallahassee was using the Gulf Coast edition of TV Guide.
At one time, New England was chock-a-block with several editions covering very small geographic areas. Toward the end of the regional editions era (2004-2005), there was some consolidation, but the Springfield area kept its edition. Boston and Providence were merged into a single TVG.
The Vermont edition had a long border with Canada, and it's very likely that readers within a few miles of the border spoke French in the home and watched French-language stations from Quebec. Sherbrooke stations were carried on cable deep into New England to serve areas with historically significant French-speaking populations.
All three of the maps on Matt Sittel's page show Tallahassee as receiving the South Georgia edition.
The Gulf Coast edition was done away with in the 2004-2005 restructuring, replaced for the most part by a Southern Alabama edition.
There were isolated instances of remote counties getting an TVG edition that was utterly unsuited to local viewing habits. At one point prior to the transition to national editions, the Washington edition was sold in Pendleton County WV (this was probably the decision of the magazine distributor, as they were "officially" in the Central Virginia circulation area, and towards the end, Virginia State), much to the consternation of local readers who wanted listings for WHSV Harrisonburg, not listed in the Washington TVG. I also recall buying the Eastern Virginia TVG there one time, which did include WHSV. It is one of the most isolated counties in the eastern United States, separated from Harrisonburg by a formidable mountain range, and is near the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone at Green Bank. Gorgeous country, but you really have to want to go there, there's no easy way to get to it.
At one time, a cable company in rural Pendleton County carried the Toledo, Ohio stations as their network affiliates, presumably they had some kind of contract with a satellite provider which furnished these stations.
WTOL was on the CanCon satellites from 1994 until 1998 or 1999 (after WJBK dropped CBS; it was eventually replaced with Detroit's current CBS O&O WWJ). Speaking of CanCon, some isolated parts of several states carried one or more of WDIV (NBC), WJBK (CBS), and/or WXYZ (ABC) in the early 1990s.
I'm almost positive that the system there (I want to say Sugar Grove but I'm not 100% sure of that) carried both WTOL and WTVG, with nearby WHSV being the ABC affiliate. Don't recall where I saw that.
A project that began in 2019, the Media History Digital Library has been digitizing every issue of TV Guide from Vol. 1 No. 1 on forward. Currently you can view and download all issues from 1953-55. The 1956 issues will be rolling out this Summer. They are mostly the local Chicagoland issues
This is pretty sweet! I didn't know this resource existed.
It's interesting to see that at first, they didn't have channel bullets, just Chicago stations with plain numbers, and Milwaukee stations in boxed numbers. I flipped ahead to the last edition (12/31/55) and saw that they had Chicago stations with black bullets, and Rockford/South Bend stations in white bullets. WTMJ-4 Milwaukee also appeared with a white bullet, indicating to me that Milwaukee by that time had its own TV Guide, and WTMJ was just listed for viewers who lived in the northern part of the circulation area and could pick it up. Otherwise it seems there would be a full complement of Milwaukee stations.
I noticed that the occasional Iowa edition slips in here and there, minus, curiously, any Des Moines stations.
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I'm guessing that they did those single-market editions for major markets because those areas were big enough to support their own edition and they correctly figured that most of their readers would sooner not have the listings cluttered up with nearby small market stations. That said, us TV nerds could choose to subscribe to something other than the default local edition. For years, I took the North Texas edition instead of the Dallas-Fort Worth edition.
The Rating Ryans website had an archive dedicated to Nielsen Pocketpieces. Whatever happened to those?
That is very odd indeed, though I noticed that all the editions are from 1955 or before. Des Moines had TV as early as 1950 (from WOI in Ames) with the commercial stations actually licensed to Des Moines coming on the air in 1953. So it's possible there was some reconfiguration at some point.
The Iowa edition I remembered had Des Moines-Ames, Cedar Rapids-Waterloo, the Quad Cities, and KTVO from Kirksville, Mo. (effectively based in Ottumwa, Iowa until 1975 or so).
Perhaps Des Moines had its own edition, and thus including its stations in the Iowa edition was seen as unnecessary.
Des Moines stations showed up in the Iowa edition by 1956 (this per Matt Sittel's page). Again, maybe prior to that Des Moines had its own edition, or was in another edition that also included Minnesota or Missouri stations.
Tucson's not all that large a market, and up until the 1990s, neither was Nashville. It would have been hard to include full Nashville and Bowling Green listings in any adjacent edition (Memphis was pretty much full up, though Evansville-Paducah would have been a possibility), but Tucson stations could easily have been included alongside Phoenix. Indeed, towards the end, that's precisely what they did with the Arizona State edition, along with Yuma-El Centro. Made perfect sense as a TVG edition.
Even the editions for New York City, Chicago (up until the mid-1960s, anyway), and Los Angeles contained some stations from adjacent markets.
I would get the Memphis edition by mail but I lived far enough North that I wanted to get the Paducah/Evansville edition because I could get WPSD and KFVS in Cape Girardeau so I would pick them up at times when I was in an area that had it.
I would be very surprised if Des Moines had its own edition. If I were to speculate, I would imagine that it might be in some kind of combined Iowa-Nebraska edition. Without Des Moines, before 1956, an Iowa edition would have had Cedar Rapids (3 stations) and the Quad Cities (2 stations). That would have been it. KTVO (Kirksville-Ottumwa) didn´t come on the air until mid-1955.
The Missouri edition was, as I've mentioned before, idiotically scoped. The farthest north it went was Columbia and, in my opinion, Columbia-Jefferson City really should have gone in the St. Louis edition. Then there could have been an "Ozarks" edition with Springfield, Joplin-Pittsburg, Fort Smith-Fayetteville, and Tulsa.
Oddly enough, the Des Moines stations were also in the Nebraska edition in 1957, as well as being in the Iowa edition. That still doesn't account for where they were back in the time frame when they didn't appear in the Iowa TVG, as the Nebraska edition didn't carry them either in that time frame (earliest I found was 1957).
Quite often, a "state" edition would, in fact, only cover part of a given state. The South Carolina TVG didn't list Greenville-area stations, and until the 1970s, the West Virginia edition didn't carry Wheeling or Clarksburg stations, and even then, only as "cable" stations until Wheeling was dropped and Clarksburg was added as regular black-bullet stations. That wasn't their home edition, that was the Wheeling-Steubenville edition instead. The Missouri edition would have been more correctly named the "Central Missouri" edition, and it was the default edition for much of northwest Arkansas (and, bizarrely, a long strip of eastern Oklahoma wedged between Tulsa and Fort Smith).
Except most of the stations covered weren't in central Missouri: Springfield and Joplin are southwest.
Sedalia's KMOS-TV, starting in 1961, was a repeater for Jefferson City's KRCG-TV. Thus, it did not have a separate listing. Columbia had only one TV station, KOMU-TV, until late 1971 when KCBJ-TV made it on the air.
There were a lot of two-station markets in that "Missouri" edition.
That is true.
I suppose I had in mind "everything in Missouri that isn't St Louis or Kansas City-St Joseph".
Missouri is a fairly unique state in that it has two very large cities on each end and a vast area in-between that doesn't neatly fit into either the South or the Midwest --- it's very much "its own thing". (It's worth noting that the state is even split between two Federal Reserve districts.) Other states that have two large population centers on either end, and relatively small towns and cities otherwise, would be Pennsylvania and Nevada, the latter "in-between area" being very lightly populated.
The Missouri edition almost reminds me of the old Northern Ohio edition, an "infill" edition wedged between some fairly large TV markets, except that the Northern Ohio edition contained listings for those markets and didn't have any major stations of its own (WHIZ Zanesville being about the only one), whereas the Missouri edition excluded the large markets on either side and contained listings for at least three markets within it (Joplin, Springfield, and Columbia-Jefferson City).
One notable example I have is a North Dakota edition from 1971. Its mailing label is Belle Fourche, SD. Problem is Belle Fourche is nearly 200 miles away from any ND stations yet only 50 miles from Rapid City SD--and the North Dakota edition has no Rapid City stations!
My 1970 Oregon edition does not list KTVR La Grande OR, nor do any of the Utah-Idaho editions I have cover KLEW in Lewiston ID. The 1963 Colorado edition I have does not cover KREX in Grand Junction CO (the 1978 one does).