I never purchased a TV Guide since they changed the format, until now. I am SHOCKED! This magazine is a piece of dreck! If I wanted a People/Us-azine, I would have purchased one (fat chance). Rupert Murdoch gets nothing from me from now on. (Isn’t that rich fat b*stard rich enough, yet?)

I totally agree with previous comments that noted the enormous non-TV content of the magazine. Some times I felt like I was reading my subscription to “Entertainment Weekly,” which is what the new TV Guide is trying to be, but with little success.

In my opinion, larger photos and fonts are not going to put TV Guide in the black and return the magazine to its “tiffany” status as the leading popular TV publication.

Several years ago when TV Guide began those multiple issues per week, its marketing plan was very shrewd. The publisher knew that many TV Guide collectors would go to the store to complete their “every issue” set and those into Lucy, Elvis, Seinfeld and Nascar would scarf up each unique issue, too. I actually sensed what was going on and I just bought those extra issues that appealed to me. Perhaps others subscribers began to feel the same way as sales began to dwindle and readers were finding other ways to get their local television listings.

Have you noticed, too, that the stock of paper used for the guide is very flimsy like a Paris Match you would read in the library? Or is it me? Maybe I’m being picky, but it just doesn’t feel substantial enough when I pick it up and thumb through it.

My subscription will expire in about two and a half years. As an ardent TV Guide reader and longtime subscriber (since Nixon was President), I never thought I would consider cancelling it, but it has seriously crossed my mind. I’m not going to drop it just yet, because I want to see what happens, but I am very disappointed with TV Guide.

A friend’s TV Guide subscription is scheduled to end in a few weeks. He received his obligatory form letter from “Paul Davis” the other day, but it was interesting what it stated in the first sentence. It noted that because he agreed to continue his subscription without it lapsing, he was being asked to send his money in soon. Well, my friend never agreed to renewing it and he was furious. Being upset, he tried calling the 800 number to drop the subscription, but he was told several times to try again later or go online, which he did.

Let’s hope that all of these jumbo issues will be a short phase of TV Guide’s history and the magazine will come to its senses. However, if the magazine does fold, then these issues may become more valuable to TV Guide collectors than they are worth now to the average TV viewer.

I didn’t mind a few articles and stuff, which were much more readable once I tore out the ads. But now we don’t have TV Guide so much as TV Hype. Yuck.

The much-ballyhooed larger size is a real non-starter. The old size was instantly identified among the welter of mail nobody wants. Now the ‘zine looks like just another catalogue.

I’m not sure if TV Guide has been taken over by people determined to sabotage it or by people who just terminally stupid.

The producers are focused on stimulation by fear, sex and crude jokes which does over-stimulate their audience. By the time the commercial somes around the viewer needs a slight mental break and isn’t as receptive.

The final feeling after the show is not the ‘good feeling’ as experienced with TV years ago, but is like minor trauma and creates more of a ‘bad feeling’. Years ago a TV show gave a feeling all-is-well and felt they are ‘good’ too so they deserve a reward when the commercial comes around. The buying mood was right. Their world was good, no worries all was fine.

Abusive and disfunctional people portrayed in the shows give the feeling the viewers best hold up their guard. That guard remains up during the commercial. A distrusting attitude becomes the mood during the show.
The shockshows hinder a receptive ‘buying mood’.

I have a feeling that this format change will become the biggest corporate fiasco since New Coke.

And it seems when they DO a TV-related cover… without fail.. it’s Desperate Housewives or Lost. Seems those two were alternating for a while there. Where’s my Veronica Mars cover darnit?

Its format is identical to the proposed new format for TVGuide, I’m guessing they’ll fold it into their revamped TVGuide, but if it’s not doing well, why would they continue on that path for the parent publication despite that?

When you have a magazine called TV Guide, you think everything would be run around a pretty simple business proposition. As much about TV as possible, and that’s it. And yet, over the past decade, the magazine has increasingly relied on movies and other non-television related content to fill its pages.

Even worse, it’s both cut the size of its online staff and “upgraded” the site into a bloated, almost unusable piece of crap.

The business model of TV Guide makes pretty sense, even if you end up with a much smaller sub base. There are ways of leveraging the listings online that could both bring in revenue and increase the influence of the magazine. TV Guide could have cut deals to combine exclusive mag content with audio and video for the website, an approach that wouldn’t have cost much, but would have brought the entire organization slowly into the current decade.

Yes, TV Guide is a very old media. And you can make a good arguement for shutting the whole thing down. But there’s also an arguement to be made for a turnaround. I just don’t think anyone there is capable of pulling it off.