• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

TV Guide editions and online resources

IM42A said:
I suppose I had in mind "everything in Missouri that isn't St Louis or Kansas City-St Joseph".
Click to expand...
But then you're leaving out Kirksville, Hannibal, Cape Girardeau....

IM42A said:
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.)
Click to expand...
From long experience, I can tell you that Columbia, which is just about dead-even halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis, is ever so slightly more oriented toward St. Louis than Kansas City.

If Columbia had gotten cable TV at the same time as Moberly and Jefferson City, it probably would have imported the Kansas City affiliates as well as the St. Louis affiliates and KPLR, just as those other two systems did. But one of the local newspaper publishers did everything he could to stop it. In the end, the franchise was finally awarded in 1976, and only the St. Louis network affiliates plus Kansas City's independent KSHB were imported to Columbia. Both Kansas City and St. Louis PBS stations were also imported.

The "Missouri" edition of TV Guide became much less useful at that point for people in Columbia and was not all that useful for people in the other mid-Missouri communities, either. It would have been a toss-up whether the Kansas City or the St. Louis edition would have been a better fit for central Missouri; I give the nod to St. Louis since it had no other markets in its edition.

Places like Sedalia are a whole other story; I believe Pettis County is now in the Kansas City market, though it's bounced back and forth between that and Columbia-Jefferson City. The status of KMOS-TV always muddied things up. (Milton Hinlein's revenge, it might appear.) When it re-emerged as a PBS station in 1979, it went into the "Missouri" edition.
 
The brief time I spent in the Hannibal/Quincy market I can remember Quincy and Hannibal grocery stores having different TV guides. The editions I picked up in Quincy covered KHQA and WGEM in Quincy, KTVO Kirksville (the defacto ABC affiliate), Quad Cities, Peoria and I don't remember if it included St. Louis. We got St. Louis on the cable (sim-subbed with KHQA and WGEM during duplicated CBS and NBC programming. The cable configuration seemed to indicate that had recently carried Peoria network affiliates then switched to St. Louis stations on the numbers that matched Peoria's UHFs. Eventually St. Lous was moved to channels matching their on-air channels. St. Louis's signals were fed by microwave.

Hannibal's TV guide gave us the St. Louis listings so probably was the aforementioned Missouri edition.
 
For a short time in the early 2000's I could also get the Nashville edition from the now defunct Hastings store in Dyersburg, TN because of their having a different magazine distributor than other stores in the area. So I was getting the Memphis edition by subscription and could get the Nashville edition from Dyersburg and the Paducah edition from Union City.
 
I may have elsewhere but growing up in Western Ohio the stores had both the Dayton (Southern Ohio I think) and Fort Wayne TV guides. The default mail edition was Dayton. As it stood, more of the stations we got were in Fort Wayne's version.
 
installLSC said:
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!
Click to expand...

Once upon a time, I had a TV Guide circulation map (it was in March 1976, as I distinctly remember TVG sending me a bunch of regional editions free of charge when I asked, Jack Palance was on the cover, and they enclosed the map as well), and it showed a large area that was listed as having no TVG edition (it was cross-hatched, or grayed out, or something). Seems to me that it included the area around Rapid City and lightly-populated areas in neighboring states. I said in an earlier post that they just sent that area the NYC Metro edition, but I can't swear to that. TVG might have said "just send 'em the closest thing".

I can't recreate the exact area in my mind's eye, but I think it corresponded to the Mountain Time Zone parts of North and South Dakota, and maybe western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. Much of that area (but not North Dakota) eventually became the Northern Colorado TVG, which did carry Rapid City stations.
 
installLSC said:
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).
Click to expand...
TV Guide would sometimes omit stations with low viewership. WKYH Hazard KY couldn't get listed in the Kentucky TVG for a long time, for that reason. They eventually appeared in not only the Kentucky edition, but also West Virginia and Bristol-Kingsport-Johnson City (Hazard is near the point where the three markets come together). I don't know if the BKJC TVG ever listed them when they were still WKYH. The station had a complete makeover when WKYT took it over, flipped network affiliations, changed call letters, and began a professional-quality news operation which shared WKYT's resources. The old WKYH was hideous.
 
anotherguyTN said:
For a short time in the early 2000's I could also get the Nashville edition from the now defunct Hastings store in Dyersburg, TN because of their having a different magazine distributor than other stores in the area. So I was getting the Memphis edition by subscription and could get the Nashville edition from Dyersburg and the Paducah edition from Union City.
Click to expand...
Sometimes the TVG edition depended on which magazine distributor a retailer used, and didn't always correlate to the "official" edition for that area.
 
gr8oldies said:
I'd mentioned above that Quincy stores had Western Illinois, Hannibal stores had a Missouri-centric edition including St. Louis. This was 1985-86.
Click to expand...
The Wikipedia list, which I would say is indicative but not necessarily authoritative, doesn't show such an edition. But whoever has edited that article may simply not have known about it. There's a mind-numbing variety of editions indicated on that page.
 
Mark Roberts said:
The Wikipedia list, which I would say is indicative but not necessarily authoritative, doesn't show such an edition. But whoever has edited that article may simply not have known about it. There's a mind-numbing variety of editions indicated on that page.
Click to expand...
Back in the 1950s, the STL edition actually had several stations, including KHQA Hannibal, that were out-of-market. Doesn't account for the 1980s, though. There probably isn't an authoritative list of all TVG editions ever, anything that various collectors and aficionados have put together, have just been compilations based upon best efforts. The Wikipedia list is indeed formidable.

I would love to get my hands on an 1970s TVG circulation area map, especially the one that showed that portion of the far Midwest that didn't have a home edition, but they would be very hard if not impossible to find. TVG created these maps for advertisers (and possibly news distributors) and I doubt they were intended for any audience beyond that. It was just out of the goodness of someone's heart that they sent me that map in 1976. They sent me a big package of Midwestern editions (think they came from Indianapolis) for free when I wrote asking how I could get various editions.
 
IM42A said:
Back in the 1950s, the STL edition actually had several stations, including KHQA Hannibal, that were out-of-market. Doesn't account for the 1980s, though.
Click to expand...
I moved to St. Charles County in 1972 and, at that time, the TV Guide edition had St. Louis stations only - just the six: KTVI, KMOX, KSD, KETC, KPLR, KDNL.

One thing to watch out for when trolling auction sites: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch also published a TV Guide-sized weekly TV magazine which was included in the Sunday editions. The cover was printed in color on slick paper but the remainder was newsprint, though better quality newsprint (thicker) than in the main paper.

I also discovered today that, at some point in the 1970s, a separate Denver edition was established with just the Denver stations, even though the Colorado edition also continued for the rest of the state plus Wyoming and the Nebraska panhandle - and that state edition also still included the Denver stations. A copy of each edition is now on their way to me. Denver is a particularly wild one - the only constants between then and now are independent KWGN and PBS KRMA. The "big 3" network affiliates all switched affiliations while channel 31 started out as a Spanish-language station and is now a Fox affiliate.

IM42A said:
There probably isn't an authoritative list of all TVG editions ever, anything that various collectors and aficionados have put together, have just been compilations based upon best efforts. The Wikipedia list is indeed formidable.

I would love to get my hands on an 1970s TVG circulation area map, especially the one that showed that portion of the far Midwest that didn't have a home edition, but they would be very hard if not impossible to find.
Click to expand...
I know I've seen one somewhere, possibly from Matthew Sittel, but I don't appear to have downloaded a copy - or if I have, I can't find it right now - and his site appears to have some sort of problem; I'm blocked from seeing it.
 
Mark Roberts said:
I know I've seen one somewhere, possibly from Matthew Sittel, but I don't appear to have downloaded a copy - or if I have, I can't find it right now - and his site appears to have some sort of problem; I'm blocked from seeing it.
Click to expand...
I get a warning from my ISP saying the following:

Warning!
matthewsittel.com appears to be risky. This might be because it is new or may not have the latest security.
You can still visit this site but, as a company dedicated to keeping your online experience safe, we thought you should know.
Click to expand...

Maybe it's using http instead of https. Normally, if a site is using http, it won't even go this far. Firefox will just block it. But in any case, there seems to be a security issue with it.
 
Mark Roberts said:
I moved to St. Charles County in 1972 and, at that time, the TV Guide edition had St. Louis stations only - just the six: KTVI, KMOX, KSD, KETC, KPLR, KDNL.

One thing to watch out for when trolling auction sites: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch also published a TV Guide-sized weekly TV magazine which was included in the Sunday editions. The cover was printed in color on slick paper but the remainder was newsprint, though better quality newsprint (thicker) than in the main paper.

I also discovered today that, at some point in the 1970s, a separate Denver edition was established with just the Denver stations, even though the Colorado edition also continued for the rest of the state plus Wyoming and the Nebraska panhandle - and that state edition also still included the Denver stations. A copy of each edition is now on their way to me. Denver is a particularly wild one - the only constants between then and now are independent KWGN and PBS KRMA. The "big 3" network affiliates all switched affiliations while channel 31 started out as a Spanish-language station and is now a Fox affiliate.


I know I've seen one somewhere, possibly from Matthew Sittel, but I don't appear to have downloaded a copy - or if I have, I can't find it right now - and his site appears to have some sort of problem; I'm blocked from seeing it.
Click to expand...

At some point, they split Colorado between three editions, Denver, Southern Colorado (default edition for the Colorado Springs market), and Northern Colorado. (One county in the far west got the Salt Lake edition, Rio Blanco per the 1982 map, and Dolores on the 1998 map.) All three editions carried Denver stations. As noted, the Northern Colorado edition also served western South Dakota and Nebraska, and the eastern half of Wyoming, and carried their local stations (including Scottsbluff, which is about as confusing as a sub-market gets). It was actually the home edition for those markets, but was named "Northern Colorado" as it also served the northern tier of counties in Colorado, and Denver was the 800-pound gorilla throughout much of the area immediately east of the Rockies.

Due to the Mountain Time Zone's challenges in putting together network prime-time schedules (they can't easily carry the East Coast feed two hours early, or the West Coast feed one hour late), TVG really needed editions that corresponded to that time zone and that time zone only, and regions on Central Time receiving MTZ stations (or vice versa) would be very, very lightly populated. Broadly speaking, TVG circulation areas generally obeyed time zone boundaries.
 
Mark Roberts said:
I know I've seen one somewhere, possibly from Matthew Sittel, but I don't appear to have downloaded a copy - or if I have, I can't find it right now - and his site appears to have some sort of problem; I'm blocked from seeing it.
Click to expand...

Though we've fallen out of touch in recent years, Matt and I go way back, he does an awesome job with archiving TVG channels listed pages, as well as chronicling the history of TVG. If there is a security problem with his site (I haven't had one), it's due to some kind of incompatibility with the browser, or a similar technical issue.
 
Something I've wanted to find is the TV Guide Fall Preview for 1991 from Nashville when they were testing a larger size edition. I was able to find one from a week or two later, but not the Fall Preview. I've looked on Ebay but with no luck so far.
 


Back
Top Bottom