Lotsa comment about TV Guide closure

The closure of the print edition of TV Guide is important because of the amount of comment it has engendered, comment which can't help but raise questions about the future of traditional print magazines. Because of TV Guide's profile, there has been a lot of chatter about the decision. Here are some snippets from various places:

The Toronto Sun:

Barrie Zwicker, a media analyst and publisher of Sources media guide, said TV Guide's jump to online is a risky move that foretells the long-term trend of print media putting more of its resources online.

"At first everybody thought, 'Oh well, everything is going to go online, and print is completely dead,' and that was not true," Zwicker said, alluding to alarmist sentiment heralding print's death during the Internet boom several years ago. "But very slowly, it is becoming more and more true."

Zwicker called the trend "pretty well unstoppable."

"All the readings I'm taking are that newspapers, and to some extent periodicals, are having to more and more go online," he said. "I wouldn't want to call it the canary in the coalmine because there's been a lot of canaries.

"This is the latest canary in a coalmine."

The Globe and Mail:

The shift to on-line-only distribution is an industry trend that is gathering momentum, observed a financial analyst who asked not to be named.

“Smaller-run sort of niche publications would be the ones I would expect to go first, and maybe some of the more crowded genres such as celebrity and teen-oriented magazines,” he said.

He noted that paper is the biggest expense at a magazine, typically 30 per cent of total operating costs, followed by 20 per cent for editorial content, 15 per cent for printing and 10 per cent for postage.

Going on-line will thus eliminate more than half of TV Guide's costs, but “the question is going to be: can you get advertisers on it?” the analyst said.

And although advertisers are turning increasingly to the Internet, TV Guide faces competition from other on-line listing services such as zap2it.com.

“It isn't a space that they're going to occupy by themselves.”

The Ottawa Citizen:

TV Guide's total circulation in Canada is just 243,000 copies today, down from more than 430,000 in 2002.

"It seems to me Transcontinental more than gave it the college try," said Nicholas Hirst, who was editor of TV Guide from 1994 to 1996. "Its circulation has gone down, and down, and down. It's difficult to compete with free (digital listings)."

He said making the publication profitable in the face of declining circulation would have required subscription or cover price increases.

Chris Waddell, a journalism professor at Carleton University, said TV Guide was being "squeezed out on every level." While its listings faced competition from digital and satellite services, it had to compete on the newsstands with flashy American tabloids and entertainment magazines.

"To some degree, TV Guide, whether it's the publication or a guide in your newspaper, has been dying for a while -- using the magazine to find out what's on television has become less and less important."

The Toronto Star:

The disappearance of TV Guide from the traditional magazine market reflects a struggling industry; consumers just don't read them as much as they used to, said Leslie Chan, a lecturer at the University of Toronto and a specialist in electronic publishing.

"I am surprised it's taken them that long to cancel the print publication," Chan says.

TV Guide was facing stiff competition as traditional TV programming is evolving, Chan said. Nowadays, most viewers can get on-demand services and get shows when they want them. "They don't rely on print guide anymore."

Or, they get show times from alerts on other shows, Chan said.

Also hitting TV Guide hard is a younger generation that consumes information much differently, Chan said.

As an example, Chan cites his children: "I don't think they know what a TV Guide is. That is not how they consume information."

[UPDATE]And a later report in the New York Times.