TV Guide Question

[kirkiefan]

Blame that one on part-owner Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (less is more....right CC?)

TV Guide (under Traiangle's ownership) was designed to be plain,simple and affordable. Remember when it used to cost only a quarter back in the 1960s?

Only thing I didn't like about it back then was Cleveland Amory's unabashed ability of bashing family-freindly programs...which are now virtually and equally as gone as the NAB Television Code.

Back then,the only things that were complicated were the UHF converter and additional antenna along with the color and tint controls on color sets. Antenna rotators (and signal booster/amplifiers found in the Allied and Lafayette Radio catalogs) were optional if you wanted something more complex.

I feel for my mother (and the rest of the elderly) who want to watch family-safe TV these days. Viacom's TV Land channel should be re-titled Overkill Land.

Many local newspapers issue a weekly program guide which still lists all local and area channels...it helps...but not as comprehensive (and plain and simple) as the original TVG format.

 

[Davros2006]

In recent years, depending on what kind of TV service you have (satellite dish for example), you can access an on-screen guide to see what's coming up during the day (and maybe part or all of the next day).

Also, I don't know if it's been said yet, but many TV stations have their own listings you could check out.

(Note about both of the above: They're not always 100% spot on.)

And a while back, I made my only contribution of past TV listings when I posted information from the Saturday edition of The Evening Telegram from December 21, 1991, covering both the 21st and 22nd. (The word "Evening" was dropped in '97-'98.)

 

[Ultimajock]

I also always liked Cleveland Amory's reviews -- boy, there wasn't much on TV that he liked, was there? He was, like me, a curmudgeon, and minced no words if he thought a show was silly, vapid, or insulting to his intelligence. (And face it -- a LOT of shows back in the day fit that description. Come to think of it, most of them STILL do...)

...if you liked Amory's critiques, you'll LOVE Harlan Ellison's books The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, made up of his television columns from the old Los Angeles Free Press. They were actually banned for a while in the early '70s because of White House pressure on the publisher, Ace; seems that Spiro Agnew didn't dig Ellison's fantasy of what the Veep liked to do with copies of Reader's Digest in his bathroom ;-) ...

 

[Ultimajock]

TV Guide (under Traiangle's ownership) was designed to be plain,simple and affordable. Remember when it used to cost only a quarter back in the 1960s?

..."See this quarter? It used to be a nickel!" -- Strother Martin in Slap Shot...

;D

 

[bpatrick]

It was 15 cents from its inception in 1953 until
around 1973 or '74, IIRC. Then it went to a
quarter.

 

[jh]

Thanks for confirming it was 15-cents through the 60s. I was pretty sure 25-cents came later. Did the price go to 25 all at once? I seem to recall some odd price briefly, like maybe 19-cents? Of course, I subscribed so the cover price didn't really matter to me.

 

[wbhist]

Thanks for confirming it was 15-cents through the 60s. I was pretty sure 25-cents came later. Did the price go to 25 all at once? I seem to recall some odd price briefly, like maybe 19-cents? Of course, I subscribed so the cover price didn't really matter to me.

Actually, in 1974 TVG went from 15 cents to 20 cents. The 25 cents did come somewhat later.

 

[kirkiefan]

My mistake...thanks for the correction gang!

 

[bpatrick]

Did it go to 20? I thought it jumped from 15
cents to 25 at one time, but maybe I'm having
my own senior memory breakdown. I do recall
the price increase happened around the time of
the first energy crisis, when the price of everything
was going up.

I still think TV Guide gave more for our money at
15 cents in the '50s and '60s than at $2.99 by the
early 2000s.

 

[wbhist]

I still think TV Guide gave more for our money at 15 cents in the '50s and '60s than at $2.99 by the early 2000s.

You'll have no argument from me there . . . ;D

 

[mleach]

I feel for my mother (and the rest of the elderly) who want to watch family-safe TV these days. Viacom's TV Land channel should be re-titled Overkill Land.

Oh so true about TV Land but the term "family friendly" has changed so much over the years. I still remember with movies when nudity, hard violence and the "f" word mean "rated R" but today a movie can feature all of that and still be "PG-13". I think that was the goal of the TV rating system, to help people who want to watch family friendly shows but even that has had issues over the years. I believe one rule back in the 90s when the ratings started was that any show that featured rock music would have been right off the bat be branded "TV-PG" ( for the record... country music was TVG never mind the questionable content of some country tunes ). For example that N'Sync concert that I think Disney aired back in the late 90s..that was TV-PG but a George Jones bio that aired on TV around the same time ( forgot where ..TNN?) that was "TVG". Go figure !!!

Oddly had Hanna Montana started its run back then ( the 90s) that show would have been "TVPG". I think its TVG now. Not really sure since I don't watch Hanna Montana LOL

 

[fybush]

I still think TV Guide gave more for our money at 15 cents in the '50s and '60s than at $2.99 by the early 2000s.

You'll have no argument from me there . . . ;D

The real question, I think, wasn't so much whether TVG was worth $1.50 or $2.99 or whatever it cost at the end - it was whether there was anything that the "classic" TVG could do that couldn't be done better (and cheaper) by any number of other sources by the time the 21st century rolled around.

The listings were just part of it - of course the rise of interactive EPGs and on-line listings made the regional TVG listings on paper obsolete. But everything else that the classic TVG did could be done better by other media at the end, too.

The "insider" perspective that made TVG so special in the sixties and seventies was done better, faster and cheaper by everyone from local TV critics (Aaron Barnhart at the Kansas City Star comes to mind immediately) to national magazines such as Entertainment Weekly to blogs such as TVNewser and Nikki Finke. Imagine a story like the Leno move to 10 PM - if TVG were still covering such things, the issue carrying the story would be arriving on your coffee table sometime next week, and by that time you'd have read how many articles, blog postings and message-board items about the story from other sources?

Personality profiles? People began chipping away at TVG's monopoly on those in the seventies, and Us, Entertainment Tonight, and plenty of other sources finished off the job over the last decade or so.

TV reviews? Again - no end of other sources eroding TVG's position of dominance.

What sustained the high quality of TVG's content through the sixties, seventies and early eighties was the magazine's incredible circulation reach, which was of course incredibly attractive to a wide range of advertisers. As TVG fell out of first place in national circulation, and eventually even out of the top 10, the ad revenue cratered, and that made it hard for the "new" TVG, without listings, to afford the kind of high-quality content that might once have made such a product widely popular.

 

[imhomerjay]

Blame that one on part-owner Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (less is more....right CC?)

TV Guide (under Traiangle's ownership) was designed to be plain,simple and affordable. Remember when it used to cost only a quarter back in the 1960s?

Only thing I didn't like about it back then was Cleveland Amory's unabashed ability of bashing family-freindly programs...which are now virtually and equally as gone as the NAB Television Code.

Back then,the only things that were complicated were the UHF converter and additional antenna along with the color and tint controls on color sets. Antenna rotators (and signal booster/amplifiers found in the Allied and Lafayette Radio catalogs) were optional if you wanted something more complex.

I feel for my mother (and the rest of the elderly) who want to watch family-safe TV these days. Viacom's TV Land channel should be re-titled Overkill Land.

Many local newspapers issue a weekly program guide which still lists all local and area channels...it helps...but not as comprehensive (and plain and simple) as the original TVG format.

There may be a great deal to balme on Rupert Murdoch in this world, but, seriously, the demise of TV Guide was inevitable. In a three-to-ten station world, TV Guide made sense. It worked wonderfully, and was able to leverage being about what was a comparitively 'new' medium. Even in the early days of cable with just a handful of additional channels, it worked. But one cannot reasonably think that paper format could possibly work as a business model in an era of hundreds of viewing choices plus on-demand offerings, the Internet, etc. Rupert didn't cause that. The simple march of time and technology did.

TV Guide as a paper listings product was living on borrowed time. It couldn't possibly include all of the channels--each of which is someone's favorite, and whose vocal cult of followers demanded it be included--and be (1) user-friendly or (2) economical (newsprint isn't cheap, folks). And every move made in an effort to balance adding some new channels vs. cost considerations brought more protests from some other circle who just couldn't understand why they couldn't see which episode of I Love Lucy was airing for the 3,754th time at 3:30 a.m. on whatever channel.

The value of the TV Guide name in today's world is really the part Macrovision kept--the database that helps drive the listings on on-screen program guides and the Web site. The magazine version is worth every penny the new owners paid for it..all 100 of them.

 

[TexasTom]

I do believe that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp did it's part in accelerating the decline of TV Guide. An early post in this thread noted the breadth of the articles in TV Guide back in the sixties and seventies -- everything from program reviews and celebrity fluff profiles to serious articles on bias in TV newscasts, the UHF/VHF disparity, and network/affiliate relations.

When Rupert Murdoch bought TV Guide, the serious content disappeared very quickly -- presumably, it was costly to research and produce those articles, it probably didn't "test" as well as the fluff, and a would be media baron wasn't really all that anxious to educate the public about the the political/technical/regulatory environment, anyway. That's the time that I really quit reading the articles -- and it's also the time in which TV Guide's circulation began a slow, steady decline. And remember, this was a time when cable was only adding a small handful of channels to the listings, so this is long before the number of channels made TV Guide's format unwieldy.

To some extent, the Internet has now made much of TV Guide's old purpose obsolete -- specifically, the listings. The crap fluff articles on celebrities are available in a million other places, via other magazines, TV, and the Internet, so that stuff is nothing special, either.

As for the serious content of the pre-Murdoch TV Guide -- well, anyone can access that stuff from the source through the Internet now, just by visiting the websites of the trade publications like Broadcasting & Cable or TV Newsday. But, needless to say, it doesn't get the same circulation. An article on network/affiliate relations in TV Guide in the mid-seventies might have had 20 million readers. An article on the same subject in Broadcating & Cable or TV Newsday today might get 100,000 readers. So the result is that while the information is available, it really doesn't get disseminated as broadly. I don't know how that could be different in today's fractionalized media environment, but I do consider it to be something of a shame.

 

[imhomerjay]

The thing is extensive research showed people just weren't interested in having a "Newsweek for TV" looking at newscast bias, network relations,e tc., at least not in numbers that would make it viable to produce. Yes, you can find that kind of thing today, but in different, and often more cost-effective venues. In many ways, it's really not all that different from the continuing decline of serious news in favor of Entertainment Tonight type shows or the carnival sideshows that some of the cable news networks run at night.

Simply put, had TV Guide not made some changes to more celebrity-driven content, its death would merely have been hastened.

That said, under Murdoch and after, there was still a commitment to being a "guide" and trying, within budget realities, to highlighting the shows that really deserved it, even if they weren't all the biggest hits. Those "spotlight" boxes that stayed in the listings sections were treated like gold--and what went in there was not treated lightly. No, it wasn't all Masterpiece theater, because that's not the taste of all viewers. But the staff championed more than a few shows they felt deserved it.

Any new owner with an ounce of business sense would have recognized there was no future the way the magazine was. It's easy to nitpick certain elements, and some of those criticisms have merit just as they do with any situation. The world around TV Guide changed; it needed to do the same.

 

[Corky Marlowe]

Weekly World News stopped publishing last year.
WHAT??? The NY Times could go down the tubes tomorrow and no one would care, but where in the world are we supposed to get our updates on Bat Boy, or learn what Hitler's up to these days? Sheesh!

 

[azumanga]

Weekly World News stopped publishing last year.

Actuually, earlier this year, the WWN made a comeback in print, as a weekly section of its sister tabloid, The Sun (no relation to the British paper).

 

[TexasTom]

The thing is extensive research showed people just weren't interested in having a "Newsweek for TV" looking at newscast bias, network relations,e tc., at least not in numbers that would make it viable to produce. Yes, you can find that kind of thing today, but in different, and often more cost-effective venues. In many ways, it's really not all that different from the continuing decline of serious news in favor of Entertainment Tonight type shows or the carnival sideshows that some of the cable news networks run at night.

Simply put, had TV Guide not made some changes to more celebrity-driven content, its death would merely have been hastened.

You've seen this research, or are you just assuming that it was done?

Regardless, even if the research was done, that doesn't mean it was done correctly. Remember that Coca Cola had done lots of research to "prove" that moving over to New Coke was going to be a winning move, and we all know how that turned out! Meanwhile, TV Guide's circulation did start a slow, steady decline in circulation around the time that Murdoch retooled the articles towards more fluff and less substance -- a decline that may or may not have been related to those changes.