The Press: Tiny Prodigy

As he thumbed through the Philadelphia Bulletin one afternoon, Walter H. Annenberg, publisher of Philadelphia’s morning Inquirer, paused to ponder a full-page ad. That his Inquirer carried no such ad concerned him less than the ad’s message: a Philadelphia TV magazine called TV Digest had reached a healthy circulation of 150,000. Annenberg took immediate action. For about $3,000,000 he bought not only Philadelphia’s TV Digest but similar magazines in Chicago, Washington and New York, added new editions of his own, and stitched them all together under the name of TV Guide.

Thus, in April 1953, was born the tiniest weekly bargain on any newsstand. TV Guide’s pages are 2½ sq. in. smaller than the Reader’s Digest, a periodical designed for pockets. What it sells for 15¢ —principally the week’s program listings —is a staple of the daily press. The same schedules are available in more than 400 other TV magazines, many of them peddled free by pharmacies, supermarkets, department stores and gas stations. But TV Guide has one powerful claim to distinction: with more than 8,000,000 in paid circulation, the tiniest magazine on the newsstands has become the biggest weekly magazine in the U.S.

One in Four. Despite its multitude of rivals, TV Guide has no serious competitor; it is a pocket-size giant surrounded by envious pygmies. Since its creation, TV Guide has added circulation at the rate of 700,000 a year. Publisher James T. Quirk, 49, expects circulation to climb to 12 million—a figure that would put TV Guide in every fourth TV home.

The magazine already smothers the U.S. —and part of Canada—with 63 editions, varying from a high of 1,500,000 (metropolitan New York) to a low of 10,000 (Tucson). Even more editions are in the works; Quirk plans to level off at 75. This blanket coverage gives TV Guide what amounts to an impregnable monopoly.

Nor has the steady increase of TV magazine supplements in the Sunday press materially affected TV Guide. Although all four Chicago papers print TV magazines, TV Guide’s Chicago edition has managed to hold its own. In New York the Herald Tribune’s pocket-size Sunday TV magazine, the only one in Manhattan, has done TV Guide no damage—and the Trib no noticeable good. In 1955, when its TV magazine was started, the Trib’s Sunday circulation was 550,000; it is 451,270 today.

TV Guide prospers on a circulation formula that bends many of the rules of the magazine publishing business. Although it does not discourage mail subscribers ($14 million), neither does it actively encourage them, beyond printing clip-out coupons in the magazine. It sells more copies in supermarkets (3,300,000) than it does by mail (3,000,000), and it is also distributed by beauty parlors, barber shops and auto supply stores. Of its 63 editions, only 14 are printed in the Philadelphia plant of Annenberg’s Triangle Publications, Inc. (the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, the Daily Racing Form, the New York Morning Telegraph and Seventeen); the others are job-printed in 15 locations across the U.S.

Riding the Tube. The 32-page editorial package produced at the magazine’s Main Line headquarters in Radnor, Pa., is custom-designed for televiewers. Apart from the listings, it rarely contains more than 10,000 words of text, a reading dose readily digestible during an evening’s commercials. There are a few short articles on the never-never world of TV, a page of generally toothless criticism, a crossword puzzle beamed at the intelligence quotient of the shoot-’em-up crowd. (Sample crossword puzzler: “Car 54, Where____ You?”) Of late, the magazine has erupted in a rash of impressive bylines — Eleanor Roosevelt, Political Scientist Leo Rosten, U.S. President-to-be John F. Kennedy, who exhorted televiewers to demand more honesty in TV political coverage — in a deliberate campaign to gild Guide’s public image. But TV Guide’s earned reputation for accurate listings remains its prime asset.

Although TV Guide’s profits are a care fully kept secret, its editorial costs are low — an estimated $4,000,000 a year — and the take is high: last year TV Guide grossed nearly $40 million. Having at tached itself to the big tubes glowing in 47 million homes, TV Guide is a healthy-organism fattening along with its host, a reference work as handy as the phone book. Other magazines may go in the magazine rack, but the Guide stays on top of the TV set, a viewer’s indispensable chart through shallow channels.