The library I work at got a sample issue of the new, full-sized TV Guide shrinkwrapped to our copy of Advertising Age. The flier that came with it boasts, “New Size. New attitude. New magazine.”
I realize this is Old Fart talk, but…does TV Guide really need an “attitude”? I mean, c’mon, it’s just listings of the TV schedule (which frankly I now pull off the Internet when I need them) and a crossword puzzle that is to its ilk what Murder She Wrote was to the whodunit. And how will this presumably totally phat attitude manifest itself? ‘Yo, dawg, tonight’s special episode of Hope & Grace totally represents! Da-ammmmn!’
According to their flier, they did a lot of market research, and found that people wanted “the inside scoop and behind-the-scenes stories about the shows, characters and television moments that become watercooler buzz the next day.”* ‘Watercooler buzz’? Apparently their ‘new attitude’ is from the ’80s. Perhaps they’ll also reveal which shows are so bad that they gag one with a spoon. Or maybe they could righteously declare how this isn’t “Your father’s TV Guide!”
[*The sentence following the one quoted above is “Not surprisingly, [readers] want a larger canvas that is visually more robust and compelling.” Wow! If the new format is as robust and compelling as that copy, mission accomplished!]Perhaps the most hilarious assertion, however, is that the new TV Guide is “A lighter, faster read.” Thank goodness! Apparently those forty page Stanley Fish articles deconstructing the semantics of Yes, Dear! will be a thing of the past.
Let me clue these guys in. With daily newspapers increasingly printing what is already old news by the time they hit the street, the idea of a print weekly having it’s pulse on ‘what’s now’ is…problematic. They mention that they will have a 48 hour close. Well, that would have been amazingly impressive even ten years ago. Now, however, it’s literally what snail mail is to e-mail.
Good luck with that.
