Comments on: Headlines: Ninth Art Gone, TV Guide on DVD

By: Johanna

Johanna — Tue, 30 May 2006 13:52:55 +0000

No idea, but if I had to guess, I’d say probably a combination of staff availability and/or fatigue. They’ve had an awfully long run for a webzine.

By: stanicus

stanicus — Tue, 30 May 2006 12:58:07 +0000

any idea why ninth art is going away?

By: Paul O'Brien

Paul O'Brien — Tue, 30 May 2006 09:14:10 +0000

No, I just assumed you were thinking of something about comics or the web, that’s all!

By: Johanna

Johanna — Mon, 29 May 2006 23:11:30 +0000

I was going bigger picture, Paul — 9/11, the US economy tanking as a result (and personally throwing me out of work for a year), lots of businesses closing (at least locally), that whole bad-idea war… Pre-2001 seems like a lot more than five years ago.

Or was that that dry British humour that we Americans don’t get?

By: Paul O'Brien

Paul O'Brien — Mon, 29 May 2006 22:14:12 +0000

Very nice of you to say so, Johanna. Er, what do you mean by the world changing in 2001? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. (Well, nothing with obvious relevance to comics websites, at least.)

By: Joshua Macy

Joshua Macy — Mon, 29 May 2006 16:56:29 +0000

Yes, TV Guide is desperate. They’re trying to find some way of staying in business. It was losing tens of millions of dollars a year in its old format.

By: Jer

Jer — Mon, 29 May 2006 15:47:09 +0000

Nat -

I’ve gotten enclosed DVDs with computer magazine subscriptions, and its never affected my subscription costs (and given the magazines, I doubt that they’d eat the overhead if it was more than a few cents). I suspect that this is more along the lines of TV Guide just not thinking about what they’re doing – again.

By: Nat Gertler

Nat Gertler — Mon, 29 May 2006 15:21:52 +0000

TV Guide has been reader-hungry for a fair while now. Over the course of a couple decades, it slid from sales of 20 million down to 9 million, with the big dip coming in the late 1990s. As the product was getting ever more complex (hundreds of TV channels and more targeted localities created by local cable operators), they were also met with outside and more convenient competition – the cable guides (and DVR guides) which are always at hand and are updated closer to air time than is possible with a weekly print source. They did a major redesign last year, making it look a lot more People-y, and did a number of “discount” issues as part of that relaunch.

I suspect the real reason for not including the DVDs with subscriptions may not be as a reward for newsstand buying nor to save production cost on the disc – it may be mailing costs. Looking at the USPS definition of periodical which requires it to be on printed sheets, it’s not clear to me that something with an enclosed DVD would qualify. A change in mailing class could have a huge effect on costs.

By: Smilodon

Smilodon — Mon, 29 May 2006 15:17:37 +0000

I’ve been dubious of TV Guide’s format change since it was announced. That it went hand in hand with a decrease in usefullness (the dumping of local listings, which, lets be fair, can be gotten online now) only gave me more doubts about its viability.