TV Guide's Devolution Continues (July 27, 2005)

TV Guide, once the darling of subscriptions being THE magazine to read and pay for, has continued its downward spiral with the news that it will soon roll out a revised design with even fewer listings than there are today.

As the profileration of TV listings on the web grows, TV Guide took the opposite direction last year when it decided to drop listings for TV channels between 2 and 7am weekday mornings (2-9am weeeknds) as well as shrinking the channel lineup for late nights to a few dozen channels from 11pm-2am.

The year before, TV Guide consolidated its Monday-Friday listings from 5am-5pm, angering many readers, and initiating the rapid acceleration of cancelling or non-renewal of subscriptions by the former subscribers.

Last year's revision resulted in even more dropping of subscriptions including mine.

Now with the dreaded news that TV Guide will remake itself into a tabloid, an Entertainment Weekly ripoff, the once mighty part of pop culture may be heading into the great magazine rack in the sky.

The revamp will consist of one revision that should have been initiated since cable TV channel lineups went past 50 sometime in the 90s: a larger-size format. The bad news? You guessed it. Fewer listings, making the guide very much useless. Instead of listings, we get more fluff stories nobody with a Associate Degree in basket weaving would bother to care about. There will be a ratio of three-to-one for stories over listings.

Furthermore, the magazine will rid itself of the 140-plus localized editions, instead, creating just two national editions for the Eastern and Pacific time zones, allegedly eliminating all of the local station listings, and focusing on just the broadcast and cable network offerings mostly in prime time.

The changes will go into effect with the magazine's Oct. 17 issue.

Gemstar is the parent company of TV Guide. Gemstar's CEO Rich Battista said that the digest-size magazine was losing money, but he declined to say how much. It's no wonder why it was losing money. You dropped most of the listings for most of the channels outside of prime time, you idiot Battista!

I tried the online listings, but I find them hard to scan through and navigate. I prefer a dead-tree medium for TV listings so I can just glance at the listings up and down and see what I can find. You used to be able to do that with TV Guide until 2003.

With that kind of move, the magazine will lose even more money next year and the year after that, as well as even more subscribers. Less is more may work for Clear Channel, but they're applying this idea for TV Guide with disastorous results.

While there are a lot of channels to list, especially in large TV markets with three dozen channels, and that's just in San Diego, TV Guide should have been investing in specialized editions, covering mostly free TV, movies, sports, family, variety, children's, pay-TV, women's, and even sci-fi. The free TV edition would cover every broadcast channel in the area, as well as neighboring channels that many people tune in via antenna.

The magazine would also lower its cover price to $1.99 from $2.49 as part of an effort to build up newsstand sales, which are more profitable than subscription sales. The magazine will also triple its lowest introductory price of 25 cents an issue for subscribers.

That's not enough. Just bring back the TV Guide that we can pay for and use.