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TV Guide mag, bought for $1, lays off staff in Radnor: report

TV Guide, once the largest U.S. magazine, was recently sold for $1, according to an SEC filing, and is laying off staff, says the New York Post.

    by Joseph N. DiStefano
    Published 
Radnor-based TV Guide is trimming staff, says the New York Post. "Up to 33 people - about 3 percent of the magazine's workforce - are axed from both the Radnor, Pa., and New York offices, according to one well-placed insider. The cuts are not expected to include Editor-in-Chief Debra Birnbaum or the President Scott Crystal, both of whom were carryovers from the previous owner Macrovision." Story here.

TV Guide owner Macrovision recently agreed to sell the magazine for just $1 (with up to $9.5 million in 3% seller financing) to OpenGate Capital, Beverly Hills, Variety reported last month. That's less than the cover cost of an issue ($2.99). Story here. SEC filing here.

Philadelphia, never a highbrow literary center like Boston, New York or even Chicago, was long the nation's mass-market publishing capital, a center for Bible printing, pulp novels and monthlies in the 1800s; Curtis Publishing Co.'s Saturday Evening Post, the biggest-circulation magazine in the early 1900s; and then TV Guide, the No. 1 U.S. magazine when Walter Annenberg owned it. What do we have now? Well, who reads anymore? There's always Comcast.
    JN
    Joseph N. DiStefano