Like a fading Hollywood star, TV Guide, the venerable pocket-sized weekly listing of television schedules that has graced the coffee tables of millions of American living rooms for more than half a century, is getting an extreme makeover.
In an effort to stay relevant and reverse its financial losses, the 52-year-old publication, whose circulation has fallen from its 1978 peak of 20 million to 9 million today, will shed its familiar small format and relaunch this fall as a regular-sized glossy, with more photos and stories about shows and stars -- and only a fraction of the publication's signature feature, its weekly listings.
Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., owner of the publication, figures to lose two-thirds of TV Guide's circulation because of the remake -- despite a cut in the newsstand price from $2.49 to $1.99 -- but it is hoping to pick up more younger readers, particularly women in the coveted 30-to-54-year-old demographic. TV Guide had seemed to many like an anachronism given changes in TV and TV watching, technology and the culture at large.
The public appetite for entertainment and celebrity news has grown explosively in the last several years -- illustrated by the booming circulations of such glossies as Us Weekly and In Touch -- and TV Guide is trying to catch that increasingly crowded wave. Its longtime emphasis on pages of black-and-white photos and drab listings seems almost quaint. While it has remained unchanged for many years, viewers have not. They have trained themselves to find programming information from other sources: their TVs, the Internet. Or they may not spend time trolling through listings at all.
"The daily newspaper and your own cable remote provide more instantaneous and better information than a little magazine that comes in the mail," said Kent Brownridge, general manager of Wenner Media, which publishes Rolling Stone and Us Weekly. "Admittedly, when [TV Guide] was first invented, it was a far, far, far simpler proposition. There were three networks, three local channels, no such thing as cable, DirecTV, HBO or premium cable. It was simple and pretty important information that people who'd just gotten into TV viewing needed. TV Guide provided it. Today, the information they need is much more complicated."
Still, the idea of changing what many see as an American pop culture icon saddened some TV Guide fans. "I think it's the end of an era," said Stephen Hofer, 65, a professor of media at Chicago State University who owns most of the 2,731 editions ever published (this week included).
