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TV Guide editions and online resources

Hello! Thought I'd join the fun. I live in York PA, and my editions of interest (and the ones I'm most familiar with) are Central PA, PA/NY, and Southeast PA. I was able to find about 12 boxes of Southeast PA last year off of Facebook Marketplace, and it helped fill in some of the dots of things I'd wondered about. To start:

In January 1989, SE PA mysteriously dropped WHYY-12 (PBS from Philly), presumably to make room for TNT. It reappeared about a month later.
 
IM42A said:
This is the Everything Bagel of TV Guides. I didn't know such a wide-ranging edition ever even existed. This looks to have been the mothership of the Northern Colorado (Rapid City/Cheyenne/Casper) and Southern Colorado editions. In all likelihood I'll be scouring eBay in the next day or two, to try and find a full edition from this era. This is arguably the most interesting edition of TVG ever.

There's a fair amount of consistency in the channel bullet schemes, with Denver and the KWGN stations in black bullets, and everything else in white bullets, except for KREX which is its own thing entirely (three channel 5s, pretty much had to be). The KWGN stations seem to have run fairly decent local news schedules. KOTA and KDUH seem to have run identical schedules, but it's odd that KOTA is listed as CBS/NBC, while KDUH (call letters signifying the Duhamel family which owned KOTA) is listed as ABC/NBC. Yet more Scottsbluff/Hay Springs submarket madness. (Fun fact, in the 1970s I actually DXed KDUH one time from Kentucky during an e-skip opening, I recall a midday newscast with three men standing at separate pillar-like podiums. Not clear whether that was KOTA being rebroadcast, or a local Nebraska thing.)

This was an edition badly in need of a split.
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Of course, I meant to say KGWN (channel 5 in Cheyenne). KWGN was channel 2 in Denver. I just caught this.
 
I've got a 1978 Colorado edition and KOTA and KDUH deviated more than you think. For example KDUH aired Monday Night Football while KOTA aired MASH, One Day at a Time, and the NBC movie.
 
installLSC said:
I've got a 1978 Colorado edition and KOTA and KDUH deviated more than you think. For example KDUH aired Monday Night Football while KOTA aired MASH, One Day at a Time, and the NBC movie.
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I don't doubt what you say, but this got my curiosity up, and I just now happened to find a 1977 Colorado edition on eBay for a reasonable price, so I snagged it.

I am rebuilding my TVG collection (not actual editions by weeks, that'd be impossible) piece by piece. I once had about a thousand TVGs but they got ruined by mold infestation when they were stored in my parents' garage in Myrtle Beach for a couple of years. I'd sent them down there for reasons of storage, and the moist ocean air had its way. That is not as big a loss as it might sound like, much of this was just concurrent weekly editions of the South Carolina and Eastern North Carolina TVG. I am far more interested in variation among different TVG editions, than I am in continuous weekly runs of the same edition.
 
installLSC said:
I've got a 1978 Colorado edition and KOTA and KDUH deviated more than you think. For example KDUH aired Monday Night Football while KOTA aired MASH, One Day at a Time, and the NBC movie.
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In Rapid City, KEVN/KIVV was full ABC (it may have aired NFL games from whichever network KOTA didn't carry games from), but never put a rebroadcaster in Nebraska. Even today, the Nebraska panhandle is a patchwork of markets (Scottsbluff is in the Cheyenne market but gets a couple of Denver stations; the Cheyenne market is effectively merged with Casper, but that's a different story)
 
ftballfan said:
In Rapid City, KEVN/KIVV was full ABC (it may have aired NFL games from whichever network KOTA didn't carry games from), but never put a rebroadcaster in Nebraska. Even today, the Nebraska panhandle is a patchwork of markets (Scottsbluff is in the Cheyenne market but gets a couple of Denver stations; the Cheyenne market is effectively merged with Casper, but that's a different story)
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Officially (per the 2019 Nielsen map), all of it except Scotts Bluff County is in the Denver market, but if other cities such as Cheyenne, Rapid City, North Platte, and the Scottsbluff satellites (try as I might, I simply cannot figure out how KNEP and KSTF break out among the Cheyenne, Rapid City, and North Platte markets) are received either OTA or on cable, that hardly reflects actual viewing patterns. Satellite subscribers, of course, only get the stations from the market to which their county is assigned. It's similar to the situation in eastern Kentucky, which is somewhat artificially split between Lexington, Charleston-Huntington, Knoxville, and Tri-Cities.

Fun fact, the county is Scotts Bluff (two words), but the city is Scottsbluff (all one word).
 
I sat here today and tried to figure out the Scottsbluff satellites situation and it seems to break out something like this:
  • KNEP-4 (which used to be KDUH), NBC, is a satellite of KNOP-2 North Platte, and is also broadcast on KGWN-5.2 Cheyenne, as Cheyenne's NBC affiliate
  • KSTF-10 is a satellite of KGWN, and repeats KGWN-5.1 CBS and KGWN-5.2 NBC, the latter being a rebroadcast of KNEP-4.1
So in short, they are a mash-up of Cheyenne and North Platte, with Rapid City being totally out of the mix. To confuse matters even further, KNOP is owned by Gray, whereas both of the Scottsbluff satellites (as well as the "mothership" KGWN) are owned by Marquee. It'd be simpler to collapse Cheyenne and North Platte into a single market, if they weren't over 200 miles apart, but then you have the North Platte mini-market served by LPTV repeaters of stations from the Lincoln-Hastings-Kearney market to provide network infill. (And then there's the situation with ABC in Cheyenne, KKTQ-LD-16 being a semi-satellite of KTWO-2 in Casper, end result being that western Nebraska has no local ABC.)

This kind of reminds me of the situation with the Harrisonburg and Charlottesville markets in Virginia, where WHSV kinda-sorta rebroadcasts WVIR on a subchannel (at the very least they run WVIR's news, not sure if it is a total rebroadcast), yet they remain two separate markets cobbled together with LPTVs. Seems to me it would be simpler to collapse it all into one market and use the LPTVs (and subchannels) as needed to fill in coverage gaps (and the distance between the two cities, unlike with Cheyenne and North Platte, is not much at all).
 
And one other thing to consider, you are talking about a very, very sparsely populated area when you describe western Nebraska. Some counties have less than a thousand people. I'm all for localism in broadcasting, but when you have an area such as that, it's probably easier just to deliver television by satellite from Denver.

Cherry County is larger in area than Connecticut or Puerto Rico, yet has less than six thousand people. That is less than one person per square mile. Now that is isolated.
 
IM42A said:
And one other thing to consider, you are talking about a very, very sparsely populated area when you describe western Nebraska. Some counties have less than a thousand people. I'm all for localism in broadcasting, but when you have an area such as that, it's probably easier just to deliver television by satellite from Denver.

Cherry County is larger in area than Connecticut or Puerto Rico, yet has less than six thousand people. That is less than one person per square mile. Now that is isolated.
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Speaking of Cherry County, it is in the Sioux Falls market, but the cable system in Valentine carries CW, FOX, NBC, and PBS from North Platte (likely for Nebraska news) and ABC, CBS, and CW from Sioux Falls.
 
ftballfan said:
Speaking of Cherry County, it is in the Sioux Falls market, but the cable system in Valentine carries CW, FOX, NBC, and PBS from North Platte (likely for Nebraska news) and ABC, CBS, and CW from Sioux Falls.
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Yes, it is a bit far afield of the area being discussed here, but I just use it as an example of an immense county with a very small population.

Strange that it would be in the Sioux Falls market. You'd think it would be North Platte (but NP is a short market as far as full-power stations are concerned, it'd be hard enough to get KNOP), or if they were going to import stations from someplace far away, Lincoln would make more sense, or even leapfrog and go with Omaha.

Again, very few people. Landing in the Sioux Falls market is probably due to long-standing historical viewing habits, perhaps the terrain is such that those were the easiest stations to get back in the day. (And, hey, KELO Land! After writing this, I realized that I had no clear idea of what SF looks like, nor how large it is --- 200K people in the city proper --- so I went to Google Street Maps, and it kind of reminds me of a much smaller version of Columbus, Ohio about 50 years ago. Not a bad-looking place.)
 
I got the 1977 Colorado TVG in the mail today (Lauren Hutton, 03/12/77) and it was in surprisingly good condition for a TVG that old. I snagged it on eBay.

Some observations:
  • KDUH followed KOTA probably about 80% of the time. They did carry some syndicated shows, such as The Big Valley and Gunsmoke, instead of KOTA's programming, and when KOTA ran The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show Wednesday night (time-shifted from CBS), KDUH stayed with NBC.
  • There was a South Dakota high school basketball tournament going on that week, KOTA carried it but KDUH didn't, either going with NBC or syndicated shows.
  • Both network and local news were over by 6 pm on all stations.
  • ABC evening news was carried uniformly on all affiliates at 4:30 pm, run live using the Eastern Time Zone feed.
  • CBS and NBC evening news ran at 5 pm (presumably straight from the networks' ETZ second feed), except on KOA-4 Denver, when it ran at 5:30 pm.
  • KREX-5 Grand Junction was almost 100% CBS.
  • KGWN-5 Cheyenne and its satellites KTVS-3 Sterling and KSTF-10 Scottsbluff look to have run a 100% synchronized schedule. There may be variations that I didn't catch, but I haven't looked at each and every page yet.
  • The KGWN stations began prime time at 6 pm with ABC (evidently straight feed from the ETZ), except on Saturday nights when they went with CBS (CBS's Saturday night lineup at the time was the gold standard, hard to blame KGWN for switching).
There's more than that, but those are just the high points.

My next project may be to get a Montana TVG from the same era, and see how they switched things up. Much of Montana got Salt Lake City stations via microwave at that time.
 
IM42A said:
I sat here today and tried to figure out the Scottsbluff satellites situation and it seems to break out something like this:
  • KNEP-4 (which used to be KDUH), NBC, is a satellite of KNOP-2 North Platte, and is also broadcast on KGWN-5.2 Cheyenne, as Cheyenne's NBC affiliate
  • KSTF-10 is a satellite of KGWN, and repeats KGWN-5.1 CBS and KGWN-5.2 NBC, the latter being a rebroadcast of KNEP-4.1
So in short, they are a mash-up of Cheyenne and North Platte, with Rapid City being totally out of the mix. ... And then there's the situation with ABC in Cheyenne, KKTQ-LD-16 being a semi-satellite of KTWO-2 in Casper, end result being that western Nebraska has no local ABC.
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Okay, I think I've finally figured it out. Western Nebraska does have "local ABC", after a fashion. KCDO-3 Sterling (formerly KTVS, and before that KFBC), once a part of the KWGN network, has DRT transmitters in Kimball and Sidney, which covers a chunk of western Nebraska, but by no means all of it. The DRT system enables KCDO to get a city-grade signal into Sidney (thus honoring its license requirements), though for all practical purposes KCDO has become just another Denver station, having moved its main transmitter to suburban Denver. KCDO carries a feed of KMGH, which provides ABC at least to southwestern Nebraska (though not Scottsbluff, the signal is too meager and it's just too far). Better than nothing (I guess).
 
More observations on the Colorado edition of TVG from 1977:
  • KREX Grand Junction is an interesting station. As I noted, they were primary CBS, but they did carry some NBC programming, such as one hour of the Today show (at 7 am after they'd carried CBS news at 6 am --- running the morning shows at that time was pretty uniform in the MTZ, or at least in the area covered by the Colorado TVG) and Hollywood Squares at 11 am.
  • KREX also ran much of the CBS daytime schedule at the same time as KKTV Colorado Springs, whereas the other CBS stations ran a different schedule. They weren't co-owned AFAIK, but I am wondering if KREX had some sort of semi-satellite arrangement with KKTV, much as KJCT had in later years with KRDO. Time-shifting also gave viewers in both cities a reason to watch them instead of KMGH, which was CBS at the time.
 
Sadly, no issues of the Montana TV Guide, from the period when it would have been intriguing (time-shifting, MTZ hodgepodge schedules, multi-network stations, and so on) are currently for sale on eBay.

New Mexico would be somewhat fascinating, as would Idaho (not clear when they spun it off from the Utah-Idaho edition, which I think I already have here somewhere). The Salt Lake TVG was basically a single-market edition, and nobody likes those (Tucson, St Louis, Nashville, and so on). They're pretty boring. And Nashville, yes, I know, Bowling Green, but in the WBKO-only days, it might as well have been a single-market edition.
 
IM42A said:
More observations on the Colorado edition of TVG from 1977:
  • KREX Grand Junction is an interesting station. As I noted, they were primary CBS, but they did carry some NBC programming, such as one hour of the Today show (at 7 am after they'd carried CBS news at 6 am --- running the morning shows at that time was pretty uniform in the MTZ, or at least in the area covered by the Colorado TVG) and Hollywood Squares at 11 am.
  • KREX also ran much of the CBS daytime schedule at the same time as KKTV Colorado Springs, whereas the other CBS stations ran a different schedule. They weren't co-owned AFAIK, but I am wondering if KREX had some sort of semi-satellite arrangement with KKTV, much as KJCT had in later years with KRDO. Time-shifting also gave viewers in both cities a reason to watch them instead of KMGH, which was CBS at the time.
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KJCT was put on the air by the KRDO interests (Pikes Peak Broadcasting) in 1979. KREX-TV, originally KFXJ-TV in 1954-56, was owned by Western Slope Broadcasting (Rex Howell), later adding satellites in Montrose and Durango (KREY and KREZ, respectively). Except for a period from 1967-1970, Howell controlled the KREX stations until he died in 1978. The stations remained under local ownership until they were sold to Russell Withers in 1985.

At first, KFXJ/KREX wasn't interconnected. It's possible it could have received CBS programming via private relay from Colorado Springs but I haven't found any indication of that.

Newspaper listings indicate that KREX received protection on the Grand Junction cable system from KMGH network programming.
 
IM42A said:
New Mexico would be somewhat fascinating,
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Albuquerque and El Paso were fairly standard, though with the occasional odd variation, and the need to time-shift in prime time. The situation in Carlsbad with KAVE-TV is somewhat fascinating. It didn't get network interconnection until the 1960s, so everything was on film from CBS. Then in 1966 it became a satellite of KELP-TV (ABC) in El Paso. Roswell's KSWS, once it ceased being a purely local station, was for a time a satellite of a Texas station (wrong time zone!). KBIM-TV in Roswell (CBS) was the only truly local operation for many years.



IM42A said:
as would Idaho (not clear when they spun it off from the Utah-Idaho edition, which I think I already have here somewhere). The Salt Lake TVG was basically a single-market edition, and nobody likes those (Tucson, St Louis, Nashville, and so on). They're pretty boring. And Nashville, yes, I know, Bowling Green, but in the WBKO-only days, it might as well have been a single-market edition.
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Hey! At least St. Louis had two independents. For PBS stations, I wish it had included the SIU station on channel 8 in Carbondale as well as KETC (9). At my suburban St. Charles County (Mo.) location, channel 8 was watchable just about every night with an outside antenna, though with some noise. Channel 8 listings would have been useful in Metro East, no doubt.

I've said at various times in the past that the Columbia-Jefferson City market really should have been put in the St. Louis edition rather than the insanely configured "Missouri" edition that excluded half the state.
 


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