The Press: The successful upstart

To the dedicated TV-watcher, and the TV industry, the bible of the business is the pocket-size, 15¢ weekly TV Guide. In a scant 2½ years, it has become a standard fixture in thousands of U.S. living rooms, and the last official check by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (in the first quarter of 1955) showed newsstand sales of 2,378,000, thus made it the biggest weekly newsstand seller in the nation.

It is still growing: fortnight ago it launched its Oregon edition, i.e., local program listings and news inside a national news-and-feature jacket; editions are being readied for Oklahoma, Georgia, Louisiana. For its Oct. 1 issue, TV Guide will guarantee 39 separate editions, mail and newsstand circulation of 3,000,000 weekly.

The Little A.P. For TV Guide, the problem is not circulation, but how to print a national magazine with local news in 36 different areas. But President Walter Annenberg, 47, whose Triangle Publications, Inc. also publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily Racing Form, the New York Morning Telegraph, Seventeen, Official Detective Stories (TIME, July 20, 1953), is no stranger to regional publishing. At one time he turned out eight regional editions of the Daily Racing Form; until the Wartime paper shortage killed it, he printed four regional editions of Radio Guide. In 1953 he decided he could turn out a national-local television magazine, bought (for an estimated $2,750,000) New York’s TV Guide, Philadelphia’s TV Digest, Chicago’s TV Forecast, and combined them. For his nationwide TV Guide, Annenberg adopted a digest-size format (just the right size for keeping on top of a TV set) and set out to do a job the newspapers overlooked: cover the news of television and give detailed, accurate program listings. Within a year he had spread out to 16 editions.

Since networks and stations had little detailed program information, TV Guide’s Publisher James Quirk, veteran Philadelphia newsman and onetime press chief for General Matthew Ridgway in Korea and Japan, had to hire reporters to do the job. TV Guide’s staffers scour the studios for news, talk to directors and casts to find out what dramas are about, carefully write plot summaries to tell enough, but not too much, of the story. Program listings of coast-to-coast shows go out over TV Guide’s own leased wires, and often local stations call up the regional offices to find out what the networks will be sending. Says Quirk: “We’re kind of a little A.P., just for television.”

Guide to Stardom. To program listings (printed in large type, thus easily read by TV’s dim light), TV Guide adds a light diet of gossip (“Sheree North was tossed off a coast-to-coast interview program when she arrived sans makeup when the show was one-third over.”) and short features on TV performers. But it is neither a fan magazine nor a catchall for pressagents’ puffs. Networks often do not like what TV Guide says about their shows, but they respect it.

Though TV Guide follows the same pattern all over the nation, it is handled as 35 local magazines. A 24-page, four-color wraparound is printed in Annenberg’s Philadelphia rotogravure plant, sent out to 18 separate cities where the local sections (from 32 to 80 pages) are job-printed. Though the publishing operation seems cumbersome, Annenberg handles it all with only 367 reporters, editors, ad and circulation men—an average of about ten per magazine.

Also the Grocery. Some of TV Guide’s success is due to the big cut handed to newsstand distributors (2¢ to the wholesaler, 4¢ to the news vendor). In return, newsstand operators are happy to display TV Guide prominently, and grocery supermarkets post it at the check-out counter. Though its profits are a closely guarded secret, the company collects 9¢ for every copy, or a total of about $270,000 an issue, and its advertising revenue is expected to reach $1,750,000 this year.

The surprising success of TV Guide has sent shock waves of concern through many a publisher’s countinghouse. To meet the competition the Chicago Sim-Times is adding a TV magazine to its weekend edition, and the New York Times has expanded both its news coverage and program listings. The New York Herald Tribune brought out a weekly television supplement patterned after TV Guide when it boosted its Sunday price from 20¢ to 25¢. It not only held onto its 550,000 circulation instead of losing 25,000 to 50,000 as it expected, but picked up an additional 20,000. The Trib hopes to syndicate its TV and Radio Magazine nationally, but with ads so scarce, it is still losing money locally. Syndication is a tough problem as the Curtis Publishing Co. found out. It tested the New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. markets with its TV Program Week, but folded it after eight weeks at a heavy loss.

TV Guide is unworried about competition. When Curtis’ first issue came out, TV Guide’s newsstand sales soared an astonishing 400,000. Says Publisher Quirk: “They put out all this publicity about how every television owner ought to buy a television magazine. And the public went out and bought TV Guide.”