Word: tv
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...