Former American Idol Now Aims for Survivor

Like a fading Hollywood star, TV Guide, the venerable pocket-sized weekly listing of television schedules that has graced the coffee tables of millions of American living rooms for more than half a century, is getting an extreme makeover.

In an effort to stay relevant and reverse its financial losses, the 52-year-old publication, whose circulation has fallen from its 1978 peak of 20 million to 9 million today, will shed its familiar small format and relaunch this fall as a regular-sized glossy, with more photos and stories about shows and stars -- and only a fraction of the publication’s signature feature, its weekly listings.

Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., owner of the publication, figures to lose two-thirds of TV Guide’s circulation because of the remake -- despite a cut in the newsstand price from $2.49 to $1.99 -- but it is hoping to pick up more younger readers, particularly women in the coveted 30-to-54-year-old demographic. TV Guide had seemed to many like an anachronism given changes in TV and TV watching, technology and the culture at large.

The public appetite for entertainment and celebrity news has grown explosively in the last several years -- illustrated by the booming circulations of such glossies as Us Weekly and In Touch -- and TV Guide is trying to catch that increasingly crowded wave. Its longtime emphasis on pages of black-and-white photos and drab listings seems almost quaint. While it has remained unchanged for many years, viewers have not. They have trained themselves to find programming information from other sources: their TVs, the Internet. Or they may not spend time trolling through listings at all.

“The daily newspaper and your own cable remote provide more instantaneous and better information than a little magazine that comes in the mail,” said Kent Brownridge, general manager of Wenner Media, which publishes Rolling Stone and Us Weekly. “Admittedly, when [TV Guide] was first invented, it was a far, far, far simpler proposition. There were three networks, three local channels, no such thing as cable, DirecTV, HBO or premium cable. It was simple and pretty important information that people who’d just gotten into TV viewing needed. TV Guide provided it. Today, the information they need is much more complicated.”

Still, the idea of changing what many see as an American pop culture icon saddened some TV Guide fans. “I think it’s the end of an era,” said Stephen Hofer, 65, a professor of media at Chicago State University who owns most of the 2,731 editions ever published (this week included).

“It’s a shame. It’s the passing of a part of television history,” said Hofer, who has two free lifetime subscriptions to TV Guide, which he was given in exchange for lending parts of his collection to radio and television museums in Los Angeles and New York.

His favorite cover? June 8, 1968, which featured a photo of newsman Hugh Downs inside a thumb-shaped TV painted by Salvador Dali. Hofer said he would miss the digest format. “It think it has a coziness about it.”

Coziness apparently doesn’t cut it anymore. “TV Guide was a habit for a certain generation. Now that generation, let’s face it, has aged,” said Linda Voorhees, a visiting assistant professor of screenwriting at UCLA. She said her family subscribed to the magazine, and the children fought over the crossword puzzle.

“There was something very fun about TV Guide. There’s a sense of loss. It’s the passing of an era in some ways. Having said that, [the grief] will be short-lived, in the sense of we get over that very quickly.”

The way people watch television has undercut the very raison d’etre of the old TV Guide, said David Nevins, president of Imagine Television, which produces such shows as “24” and “Arrested Development.” Viewers’ loyalties are with specific shows, he said.

“People know how to go and find the shows they really want,” Nevins said. “It’s a function of the explosion in the media about the media. A simple TV listing guide is no longer a big enough distinguisher in the marketplace.”

Despite the substantial changes to come, including an unspecified number of layoffs, said John Loughlin, president of Gemstar’s TV Guide Publishing Group, the mission of TV Guide will remain the same when it relaunches Oct. 17.

“TV Guide enjoys literally 90% unaided brand awareness,” Loughlin said Tuesday. “It’s right up there with Coke. And while we are putting forward a significantly enhanced magazine, the fundamental mission doesn’t change.... While we’re changing the format, the magazine is not a celebrity magazine.”

In April, Gemstar launched a separate celebrity-driven magazine, Inside TV. Loughlin said that magazine, which has not reached its circulation projections, “is much more in the vein of what Us or In Touch is doing.”

TV Guide’s current editor, Ian Birch, who was hired in September, is a veteran of British and American celebrity magazines.

Still, one prototype of TV Guide suggests that celebrity will play a prominent role. “Desperate Housewives” stars Teri Hatcher and James Denton are featured on the cover. Inside stories include the big changes coming to the “CSI” shows and a two-page glossary of terms used on the series, a photo feature on “celebrity moms,” a fashion spread on how to look like a “Gilmore Girl,” a fashion “cheers and jeers” feature and reviews. The listings, four pages per day of the week, feature two pages of graphically busy highlights, plus two pages of grid listings for prime-time only.

Gemstar executives have acknowledged that TV Guide has been losing money, but they declined to provide exact figures. The company expects to lose $90 million to $110 million in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years because of TV Guide’s relaunch.

Loughlin and Birch said they tested four TV Guide prototypes with 50,000 current subscribers and received positive reaction.

“We started to notice a very clear tipping point about six to eight months ago where it became explicit that our readers were ready to let go,” Loughlin said. “They were letting go of the black-and-white digest format and were ready to embrace a full-color, more integrated product. We’ve seen a sea change, driven in part by digital penetration and the ubiquity of listings.”

To some, an evolution of the little magazine is long overdue. “While [TV Guide] has included some solid enterprise journalism along the way ... its bread and butter has always been the listings, the celebrity stuff and the coverage of the new season,” said Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “But ‘the new season’ doesn’t exist anymore; programs are yanked and replaced all the time. Celebrity stuff is universally available. And not only are the listings in the newspaper, on the Web, on TiVo and on cable listings channels, the whole idea of appointment viewing is a relic of the past.”

A national viewer guide to television listings was the brainchild of media mogul Walter Annenberg, for whom the USC school is named. He made it into the largest circulation weekly in the world, according to the Museum of Broadcast History.

In 1988, publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch bought TV Guide and some of Annenberg’s other publications. By 1998, however, TV Guide was struggling to stay relevant as broadcast and cable channels multiplied and consumers turned to other sources for local listings. Murdoch merged the magazine with a cable channel owned by mogul John Malone that was later renamed the TV Guide Channel.

The two media tycoons merged their joint venture a year later with Gemstar International Group, which had created electronic programming guides and owns many of the scrolling listings available to cable viewers. Later, an accounting scandal at Gemstar-TV Guide International decimated its value and forced Murdoch’s News Corp. to write off its entire $6-billion investment. Murdoch pushed out Gemstar’s founder and wrested control of the publicly owned company.

But whether it turns out to be successful or not, change was inevitable for the once-ubiquitous publication.

“Even a title as legendary as TV Guide has to adapt,” said Patrick Phillips, founder of Iwantmedia.com, a website that follows the media industry. “Technology forces changes on traditional media.”

TV Guide may be an iconic magazine brand, like Life, said Phillips. “And we know what happened to Life magazine. It’s still around, but it’s something else now.”

Times staff writers Rachel Abramowitz and Sallie Hofmeister contributed to this report.