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about ailing TV Guide
Plans afoot to radically alter title's distribution?
By Jeff Bercovici
Anyone who has lived through a midlife crisis will be familiar with the urge it brings to change everything about your life. Most midlife crisis sufferers are able to appease this urge with a high-performance car or an affair.
For TV Guide, those aren’t really options. The 9 million-circulation magazine, which celebrates its 50th birthday next year, is contemplating major change indeed—perhaps in the form of a whole new business model.
The company isn’t saying anything at the moment, but speculation is heavy that TV Guide and its parent, Gemstar International, are looking at ways to get out of the magazine distribution business altogether.
That may involve handing over distribution for TV Guide and its various clients—among them, Weider Publications, Emmis Publishing and Essence Communications—to an outside party. It may even involve turning TV Guide from a traditional newsstand-and-subscription title into a newspaper supplement along the lines of Parade or American Profile, at least according to Reuters, which reported yesterday that Gemstar has been floating the idea to newspaper publishers.
A spokeswoman for TV Guide said it is the company’s policy never to comment on rumors, but there is good reason to believe that the latter scenario is at most a distant possibility.
For one thing, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, notes circulation expert Dan Capell, publisher of Capell’s Circulation Report.
"Just about every newspaper already has its own Sunday TV guide," says Capell. "I don’t know how you replace that."
"I don’t see the real advantage to the newspapers," agrees magazine consultant Martin Walker. Not only would it be redundant, he says. It would even be, in a sense, parasitical.
"Newspapers don’t like to have supplements that have advertising that competes with the type of advertising they sell. And TV Guide gets an enormous amount of local advertising."
More plausible is a report that Gemstar is close to a deal to hand over its distribution operations to COMAG Marketing Group, a distribution venture jointly owned by Hearst and Condé Nast.
That TV Guide, whose early success was founded largely on its strength in distribution channels, is even considering an exit from the distribution business is an indication of just what kind of trouble it is in.
After attaining a peak circulation of nearly 20 million in the mid-1970s, TV Guide’s decline began as newspapers, which initially shied away from listings out of reluctance to help out what they saw as a rival medium, increasingly started featuring weekly programming guides.
Like other mass-circulation titles, TV Guide really suffered in the mid-90s from the collapse of the stamp-sheet sweepstakes firms Publishers Clearing House and American Family Publishers, upon which it relied for a large volume of inexpensive subscriptions.
Two other new developments, the proliferation of cable and satellite TV channels and the availability of channel listings online, have also posed challenges for TV Guide. Gemstar’s answer has been to increase the emphasis it places on the brand’s online and cable TV components.
Amid all this, TV Guide saw its ad pages and revenue decrease in 2000 and again in 2001. The losses have accelerated this year: Total ad pages in the first quarter were down 21 percent to 617.9, and revenue was off 22.7 percent to 88.5 million, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
In other words, Gemstar would be crazy not to be thinking very hard about what the future should look like for TV Guide as it nears the half-century mark.
Even if there is little or nothing to the talk of the magazine going off newsstands and into newspapers, notes Walker, "It certainly indicates that the print version of TV Guide may have been a business of the past."
April 12, 2002 © 20
02 Media Life-Jeff Bercovici
is a staff writer for Media Life.
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