Once the “bible” for television’s most faithful audience,
TV Guide is a national weekly entertainment magazine
that combines local program listings for network, cable,
and paid television with celebrity interviews and articles
on popular television shows. Currently owned by News
Corp. and available for delivery in only the United States,
the magazine was an outlet for highly opinionated political commentary in the past, but, in keeping with the larger
trend in media over the last decade, today’s TV Guide comfortably accommodates to the contemporary obsession with
entertainment celebrities.
The magazine was founded in the early 1950s by publishing entrepreneur Walter Annenberg (also owner of the
Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily Racing Form, a former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and a noted philanthropist). In 1952, after purchasing three local television
guidebooks (Chicago’s Television Forecast, Philadelphia’s
Local Televiser, and New York’s Television Guide) that had
been introduced in 1948, Annenberg combined them into a
national publication that used identical feature content for
all editions and customized local channel listings for each
city.
The first national issue of TV Guide hit the newsstands
on April 3, 1953, with Lucille Ball and her son, Desi Arnaz,
on the cover. Approximately 1,560,000 copies were distributed in 10 cities, an initial circulation that only reached
a fraction of the 25 million television households in the
United States at the time.
In concert with the enormous popularity of television,
TV Guide was a major publishing success. One interesting
aspect of its early success was the fact that in the 1950s
many newspapers, reluctant to promote what they perceived
to be a new media competitor, refused to include TV listings. As a result, TV Guide was for a while the only available source for what was on TV. And television itself was
changing the values for American homes, with popular
shows such as Leave it to Beaver and American Bandstand
portraying the perfect on-screen families that viewers hoped to emulate. Television became increasingly popular
in 1954, when color sets came into being, and by the 1960s
millions of viewers began tuning in to the hit programs featured within the pages of TV Guide, including the popular
Sunday evening variety show The Ed Sullivan Show and the
renowned sitcom I Love Lucy.
In the decades following its birth, as the number of
households owning a television set reached 97 percent by
the mid-1970s, the interest in TV Guide was also experiencing a steady increase in numbers throughout the country.
By the time the publication achieved its peak circulation of
twenty million in 1977, it could claim to be the largest-selling magazine in the world, and observers speculated that
Annenberg was making one million dollars a week from
the publication.
In its early years, TV Guide saw itself as a guardian of
the public taste, harshly judging television shows that its editors considered to be beneath the American public’s intelligence. For example, it often criticized the game shows and
the high number of westerns that dominated the network
schedules. Moreover, the magazine promoted the concept
of what was called “dialsmanship,” encouraging its readers to make informed viewing choices. In keeping with a
belief in the television’s potential for information as well as
entertainment, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, TV Guide
employed such celebrated critics as Cleveland Amory and
Judith Crist, and published “think pieces” by such authors
as sociologist Margaret Mead, novelist John Updike, and
even John F. Kennedy. In the 1970s, to remain consistent
with Annenberg’s loyalty to the Republican Party, the magazine published columns by Pat Buchanan and an essay by
then-Vice President Spiro Agnew.
A few years later in 1982, TV Guide experienced one of
its finest hours when it published an article that indicted CBS
News for airing a poorly reported and biased documentary,
The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, accusing
General William Westmoreland of lying to Americans concerning the strength of the Viet Cong troops in the months
before the 1968 Tet offensive. Afterwards, CBS News admitted that it had violated its own in-house guidelines for investigative pieces, and Westmoreland eventually filed a $120
million libel suit against CBS. After an eighteen-week jury
trial in New York City, however, Westmoreland and CBS
mutually agreed to an undisclosed private settlement.
In 1989, Annenberg sold TV Guide magazine, along with
his other properties, to fellow media mogul Rupert Murdoch
for $3 billion. By the time of the sale, however, the publication was no longer known for its more enterprising forms
of journalism. Celebrity pieces had in large part replaced
TV Guide’s critical essays and investigative reporting, and
soon the magazine’s editorial department was moved from
Radnor, Pennsylvania, to New York City.
In the mid-1990s, a new editor, Steven Reddicliffe,
was hired to improve newsstand sales. With a background
at Entertainment Weekly and Parenting magazines, Reddicliffe stressed what was termed the “collectible factor.”
Individual issues of the magazine began to focus on specific personalities and events (e.g., NASCAR racers, boy
bands, etc.) and the line between television and movies was
blurred. As a result of these editorial changes, the magazine’s balance sheet showed some improvement, and in the
late 1990s, the magazine was merged with United Video
Satellite Group to form a broadcast television version of its
programming grids. In 2000, Gemstar purchased the magazine, a move that allowed the new TV Guide to list VCR
codes for programming along with broadcast dates, times,
and synopses.
In the midst of these content and ownership shifts at the
magazine, television itself was clearly undergoing a major
transformation. The three major networks lost their dominance, cable and satellite options proliferated, and viewership became divided into increasingly smaller segments. In
addition, listings competition from Internet sites forced the
magazine to publish 126 different weekly editions to encompass every one of its regional variations in programming.
Despite its best efforts, the magazine’s prospects at the
opening of the twenty-first century were somewhat clouded.
Circulation problems included a drop of 30 percent to
nine million subscribers. Even more troubling given all
the changes in the television landscape of the last decade,
there was, according to some observers, some uncertainty
as to who was the publication’s primary readership. This
in turn depressed advertising rates; by way of illustration,
the cost per thousand for an advertisement in the magazine
(the standard measure of value in the media industry) was
approximately $12, compared to $40 for the average consumer magazine in America.
Looking to the future, it is hard to predict what might
lie ahead for the publication. Its stock price has over time
declined considerably, from a high of $80 a share to somewhere below $15. Founded just over fifty years ago at the
dawn of the then-new medium of television, TV Guide’s
program listings have always been the magazine’s raison
d’etre. What’s on TV tonight? The nation wanted to know,
and, for more that five decades, TV Guide told them. But
given both the variety of informational sources available
today and the fractionalization of television programming
itself, the role of a single integrated national print product
is far from certain.
Further Reading
Altschuler, Glenn C., and David I. Grossvogel. Changing Channels: America in TV Guide. Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1992.
Baker, Russ. “Murdoch’s Mean Machine.” Columbia Journalism
Review 37, no. 1 (1998): 51–56.
Editors of TV Guide and Adam West. TV Guide Guide to TV:
The Most Defi nitive Encyclopedia of Television. New York:
Barnes & Noble Books, 2004.
Harris, Jay S., ed. TV Guide: The First 25 Years. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1978.
Lasswell, Mark and TV Guide. TV Guide: Fifty Years of Television. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2002.
David Abrahamson
Haiwen Lu