L.A. Times Stops Auto-Delivering T.V. Listings

17 September 2006 | Community, Culture, Media | Comments

We still get the print edition of our local paper, the Los Angeles Times, although increasingly I find it hard to justify killing the rain forests in order to do so. Since I was a child here in Los Angeles, a linchpin of my experience of the Sunday L.A. Times has been TV Times, the paper’s facsimile of TV Guide.

Today’s Sunday edition came with an interesting notice to all subscribers: “Important Notice Regarding TV Times. Beginning September 30, TV Times will be delivered on Saturdays and only upon request.”

I don’t plan to make the request because we get most of our TV information from the TiVo onscreen guide, Entertainment Weekly, the TV listings on Yahoo that can connect to our TiVo via the internet and through other less regular sources like word of mouth. So, sitting on my desk right now is the last TV Times I’m likely to see, and what an anemic little property it has dwindled into– incomplete listiings, one paltry 200 word feature, no advertising. Years ago — before TiVo and the internet — a careful read of the TV Times listings and many features was a Sunday ritual– particularly the long list of movies playing throughout the coming week.

So why did the L.A. Times — or perhaps Tribune, its corporate owner — do it?

Some guesses:

• With 1000 channels plus lots of VOD, it has become prohibitively expensive to print everything on TV each week.

• If TV Guide — the big one, founded by Walter Annenberg — is waging a battle against shrinking readership, how can the off brand TV Times compete?

• The L.A. Times still provides TV listings on its website, served up by Zap2It.com, another Tribune property.

• Even though DVRs like TiVo only have a 12% penetration (according to a recent study that I spotted at www.kenradio.com), most cable companies now have an online guide and even a dial-up connection to the internet can get you to Zap2It or the like.

• The L.A. Times must figure that no desirable advertising demographic is reading its printed TV listings.

So here’s where things get interesting: what’s next?

Let’s call the sort of information that TV Times provides “commodity coverage.” This is the basic, easily verifiable, factual information that — until the internet came along — a local newspaper provided as a reliable data source of record.

Increasingly, newspapers are going to get out of the commodity coverage business, offloading things like TV listings, weather, stock coverage and the like to other businesses that can do it cheaper, faster and online rather than in print. Right now, I predict that they will partner with those other companies in order to at least pretend to be a one-stop information shop for their readers, although the information will lack anything like a local flavor. Will Zap2It or some other Tribune entity understand the local tastes of Los Angelenos? I rather doubt it.

But with the commodity coverage gone (or at least going… going… ), the pressing question is what will be left? What sorts of coverage will define the editorial product of the L.A. Times? How will the paper’s brand evolve when it is forced to focus its energies on things that cannot be commodified? And, more importantly, can it make a living on that sort of coverage?

Book reviews are already dropping away of local newspapers like groupies from a rock band that has lost its lead singer. TV listings are hardly as grevious a loss as the book reviews (for the record, the L.A. Times Book Review has actually gotten better in the last couple of years), but it’s still something to watch.

What’s next?