The Tarting Up of TV Guide

By Richard Zoglin

In some homes, it makes a terrific coaster. In others, it is a well-thumbed compendium of the week's TV programming, whose surrounding color pages are ignored. Yet for 36 years TV Guide has maintained a sturdy, if seldom appreciated, tradition of editorial quality in those pages. Along with celebrity profiles and background stories on upcoming programs, the magazine has done much enterprising reporting on the TV industry. Most notably, in 1982 it ran a 13-page story exposing alleged ethical violations during the making of the CBS documentary The Uncounted Enemy: A Viet Nam Deception -- charges that formed the basis for a libel suit against CBS by General William Westmoreland.

Those days, however, are swiftly becoming a memory. Last September TV Guide's parent company, Triangle Publications, was sold by Walter Annenberg to Australian-born press magnate Rupert Murdoch for $3 billion. Murdoch, whose worldwide properties range from tabloids like the Star to the London Times, has instigated some wrenching changes in the familiar coffee-table companion.

In the Murdoch revamp, stories are shorter, pictures more plentiful and the fluff content higher, with a proliferation of one-page features on such hot topics as "Geraldo's Compromising Tattoo." The magazine has added a horoscope page and a rundown of the week's soap-opera plots -- two low-rent staples of daily newspapers. Its late-breaking news pages, once a source of knowing industry tidbits, have become splashier and more trivial ("Rating the Oscar Parties: The Best and the Worst"). Cover stories, meanwhile, have kept both eyes on the newsstand: a January story about rock music on TV, for example, had no timely reason for being except to get Elvis Presley's face on the cover.

At TV Guide headquarters, divided between Radnor, Pa., and New York City, turmoil is mounting. A new publisher, Valerie Salembier, was brought in last fall; she cut a swath through the advertising department, firing the ad director and eliminating dozens of jobs -- then quit after just five months. On the editorial side, the managing editor and Hollywood bureau chief have resigned, and top editor David Sendler must now answer to a new corporate overlord: Roger Wood, former editor of the sensationalistic New York Post, which Murdoch owned until last year. "There's no interest anymore in analysis of the industry or in taking a serious look at the content of TV news," says an unhappy staffer. "The watchdog role that TV Guide has traditionally played is being totally abrogated." A few exceptions remain, like last week's report "Is TV News Guilty of Japan Bashing?" Yet Wood, according to insiders, singled out that piece for criticism, claiming that such stories are impeding "the popularization of TV Guide."

As the largest-selling weekly magazine in the U.S., TV Guide might seem to be plenty popular already. But with growing competition from monthly cable guides, as well as from Sunday-newspaper TV supplements, circulation has been slipping -- to 16.3 million for the last half of 1988, down from nearly 17.3 million in early 1987 and more than 18 million in the late '70s. Advertising revenue too has flattened out, dropping 6% in the first quarter of 1989 from a year earlier.

Not that TV Guide is in any danger of losing its standing as the nation's premier TV magazine. (Its last serious competitor, Time Inc.'s TV-CABLE WEEK, expired after six months of publication in 1983.) Officials contend that the circulation drop can be explained by an increase in cover price (from 60 cents to 75 cents) and a pruning of some expensive-to-acquire subscribers. Advertising revenue, they add, was affected by last year's TV writers' strike (which delayed the networks' fall promotions) and by the elimination of a long-standing practice in which TV Guide traded ad space to local stations in exchange for commercial airtime.

"I want to rectify any illusion that TV Guide is broke and needs to be fixed," says Joseph Cece, installed by Murdoch as TV Guide president. "This is one of the most enormously successful magazines in the history of publishing. What we're doing is looking to take it to a new level." The goal is to boost circulation to 18 million, he says, mostly by increasing newsstand sales. The next gimmick: a 16-page insert of discount coupons, to run at least once a month beginning in June.

The tarting up of TV Guide has dismayed many staffers. "The Murdoch people do not understand the American magazine reader," says outgoing managing editor R.C. Smith. "TV Guide has belonged to a small group of magazines, like National Geographic and Reader's Digest, in that it has always managed to be respectable so that people want to have it in their homes. ((The new bosses)) have a virgin-and-whore feeling about journalism -- you're either the Times of London or the Sun. The idea that there's a balancing act in between, I think, is alien to them." So, apparently, is openness to reporters: Smith, who had already announced plans to leave at the end of the month, was abruptly fired after it was learned that he had spoken to TIME.

Some of the darker warnings about Murdoch's takeover have not been borne out. TV Guide is not giving special editorial treatment to the Fox network, which is part of Murdoch's media empire. The listings section is still unmatched for comprehensiveness and accuracy, and the magazine's personality pieces retain a healthy edge of skepticism. Moreover, some staffers believe the old TV Guide, with its rather stodgy format, may have been due for rejuvenation. Yet that sober, even-tempered tone of voice always provided an important bit of ballast for a business fraught with glitter and hype. The danger is that when the current make-over is finished, one of the TV industry's watchdogs will wind up as just another part of the show.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York