After more than 50 years as America's family room guide to TV listings, and recent years of spectacular circulation declines, TV Guide is undertaking a dramatic makeover that will slash its circulation to a third.
   It will also dump most of the magazine's TV listings, replacing them with editorial content, and move to a larger format.
  The company is announcing today that it will trim its ratebase to 3.2 million and transform the magazine from its reliance on listings to one made up of features, reviews and recommendations.
   The change comes in part as an effort to reduce production costs associated with maintaining one of the largest circulations in the industry, at 9 million.
   The revamped TV Guide will produce one national edition instead of 140 different regional editions. But even with the reduction the company expects the magazine to lose between $90 and $110 million between its 2005 and 2006 fiscal years.
   But the bigger reason for the makeover is that  the listing format had outlived its usefulness in an era when TV viewers can find show listings on the internet, in their local papers, and on their TV sets with a push of a remote control button.
   "Nobody actually needs a guide anymore," says Samir Husni, a magazine consultant and chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi. "We've come a long way from the days when we had a few [TV] options to having 500 options every night. We're looking for someone to give us more than the yellow pages for TV."
    The revamp of TV Guide is hardly a surprise. Rumors had been circulating for the past several years, and they intensified over recent months.
  What is surprising is the degree of change, which will essentially kill off the old TV Guide in all but name and replace with an entertainment title more closely akin to Entertainment Weekly.
  The new format will devote 75 percent of the edit space to features, reviews, photos and behind-the-scenes information, with 25 percent devoted to listings. That's a reverse from the old format that relied on a 75/25 percent split between listings and features. Further, instead of complete listings, the magazine will run highlights and recommendations for readers.
   Scott Crystal, the senior vice president and publisher of TV Guide, told Media Life today that the magazine found readers did not want listings that have become readily available elsewhere but instead wanted a more appealing, more relevant and more entertaining magazine.
   “What came back loud and clear is that they really wanted a magazine that had more color and more dramatic use of photography and more behind the scenes on the sets."
   TV Guide has faced increasing pressure in recent years from outlets, including its corporate siblings like TVGuide.com and the TV Guide cable channel, that provide viewers with more current listings.
   The move to a full-color entertainment magazine places the title in competition for advertising dollars not only with People and Entertainment Weekly, but also with the newsweeklies and with its own spin off, Inside TV, which launched in April.
   The company says the two titles will serve different demographics.
   Inside TV is for a younger audience that is celebrity- and style-driven, while TV Guide will be a more TV show-focused, family-oriented magazine targeted for women 35-54.
   But the company acknowledges that Inside TV has not performed well since its launch, and analysts are doubtful that both titles will survive. "They're courting the two magazines for a marriage,"  says Husni, who suggests that TV Guide might eventually give way to Inside TV because of its advertiser-friendly women 18-34 demographic.
   Crystal disagrees. "They serve such distinct audiences and the products are highly different in look, design, feel and content," he says. "The long-term future of each one is incredibly positive."
   In its circulation downsizing, the magazine is eliminating 3 million sponsored sales, about a third of its total circulation. It is guaranteeing advertisers 3.2 million subscribers and offering a bonus circulation of 1.3 million at the launch of the new format.
   TV Guide expects to increase the proportion of newsstand sales under the new format, which will retail at $1.99, 50 cents less than the old format. Total newsstand pockets will fall, but the company says it will launch with 70,000 and expects to have 100,000 pockets by the end of 2006. It says it will find new high-volume pockets such as airports to attract readers.
   TV Guide says it expects a pass-along rate of five readers per copy that would equate to about 20 million readers per issue at launch.
   The magazine says it expects to attract new ad categories such as fashion, beauty, automotive and consumer electronics.
   "We absolutely will be more appealing to a host of new advertising categories," Crystal says.
   But it may have a hard time convincing media buyers that a revamped TV Guide is more attractive than its predecessor. 
   "It's a big if," says Jack Hanrahan, the director of print operations at OMD USA.
   "I'd be pretty skeptical about being in TV Guide until it shows it can do what it supposedly is going to do. There are a lot of good places to invest money while they find their place."
   Despite the 9 million circulation TV Guide reached under its old format, media buyers have not seen it as an attractive buy because at least 3 million are sponsored copies and many end up distributed in hotel rooms.
   "They were reaching middle America but they didn't have a unique audience," says magazine consultant Martin Walker. "It was a struggle for them to get mainstream advertising other than mass market and mail order stuff."
   Ad pages for TV Guide were down 20.6 percent year-to-date through June.
   Some media buyers are already talking about the title in the past tense. Unless its new format reinvigorates TV Guide, subscribers may do the same.   
   "It was [a] product that was right for its time," says Hanrahan. "It was a huge success for many, many years, but times change."