Word: murdochized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...consolidation in the communications business and by the many foreign acquisitions of American companies. In recent years, West Germany's Bertelsmann bought RCA Records and the Doubleday and Bantam Books publishing houses; Britain's Robert Maxwell took over Macmillan publishers; Japan's Sony acquired CBS Records; and Australian-born Murdoch (now a U.S. citizen) accumulated newspapers, magazines, a movie studio and a TV network. Said Time's Munro: "We see Maxwell, Murdoch, Bertelsmann and Sony coming into our market and raising hell, and we see this ((merger)) as an opportunity for an American company to get competitive." In fact, Time...