Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi Wireless was a phony it's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television. This is episode number 40, countdown number 67. What's on TV tonight for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, this podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027. That will be the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented the Definitive Biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode we met Walter Annenberg when he acquired the Philadelphia television station that launched the Dick Clark and American Bandstand.
Today we'll learn more about Walter Annenberg's real impact on both the medium and the country.
Walter Annenberg's foray into television did not stop with the low budget sock hop that premiered on his TV station in Philadelphia in 1952.
Quite the contrary. But the biggest thing that Walter Annenberg did for television was not even on television. It was in print, in a pocket sized weekly magazine called TV Guide.
Despite his company's ventures into broadcasting, Walter Annenberg was first and foremost a publisher, the business he had inherited from his father.
His first instinct was toward what he could do in print. But the idea for a magazine filled with little more than television listings did not start in house In New York. Lee Wagner, the former circulation director for McFadden Publications, recognized the growing appetite for television schedules in the late 1940s.
On June 14, 1948, working in concert with Cowles Media, Wagner published the first issue of the Television Guide, a pocket sized folio of New York area TV listings.
The debut issue featured a cover photo of former film star Gloria Swanson, who was at the time hosting a variety program on WPIX tv, one of the city's unaffiliated local stations.
Wagner soon expanded with regional editions for New England and the Baltimore Washington corridor, proving there was a marketplace for a publication dedicated to TV listings.
In Philadelphia, Walter Annenberg observed the same phenomenon. In 1948, his Triangle Publications invested in TV Digest, a small weekly that provided program listings for the Philadelphia market.
What began as a local experiment quickly grew popular, demonstrating that television required a printed roadmap to navigate its expanding program grid.
By 1953, with televisions having found their way into more than half of America's households, Annenberg decided to scale the concept nationally.
Rather than compete with Wagner's regional editions, he acquired them outright and folded them into his Triangle empire.
Both Wagner and Annenberg had proven that the concept worked in a few markets, but Annenberg had the capital and marketing savvy to create a single national publication with countless regional editions.
The first issue of Triangle Publications, TV Guide, appeared on newsstands in 10 major cities on April 3, 1953.
On its cover, 1.5 million readers were treated to a close up photo of newly born Desi Arnaz junior Television had become such an intimate thread in the cultural fabric that all of America was invited to gush over a sitcom couple's actual baby.
Later that year, on October 3, 1953, TV Guide published its first fall preview issue, establishing a cultural cycle that would last for decades.
Until that point, the the networks tended to launch their new shows whenever they were ready. TV Guide helped establish the annual ritual of launching a whole new season of programs every autumn.
Advertisers and networks seized on the fall preview as an opportunity to promote both new and returning shows.
With its blend of listings and editorial content, TV Guide assumed an exalted role as the national authority on the medium.
Over the years that followed, TV Guide expanded market by market, tailoring each edition to local channel lineups. By 1955, the magazine covered nearly every market in America, effectively becoming as firmly entrenched as television itself.
By the mid-1960s, TV Guide was publishing more than 140 localized editions, reaching more than 10 million households each week.
By the mid-1970s, its circulation climbed to nearly 20 million.
Prior to TV Guide, the most popular magazine in America was the Reader's Digest, a publication that condensed the nation's reading habits into bite sized pieces.
When TV Guide surpassed the Digest in circulation in the mid-1960s, America was no longer a nation of readers it was a nation of viewers.
The instinct that compelled the launch of TV Guide made Walter Annenberg one of the richest men in America, and he leveraged that wealth in both politics and philanthropy.
In 1969, he was named U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James, serving as President Richard Nixon's envoy to Britain.
In later years, he donated billions to schools, museums, and the arts.
His gifts have included institutions like the Annenberg Schools for Communication at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California.
Thanks largely to TV Guide, Walter Annenberg was consistently listed among Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans.
In 1988, he sold Triangle Publications to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in a deal that was valued at the time at more than $3 billion.
Walter Annenberg's ascent to the highest echelons of American society started with the publications he inherited from his father.
He added electronic media and played a critical role in the growth of television, starting with a low budget dance show in Philadelphia. When he died in 2002 at the age of 94, Walter Annenberg had built one of the great fortunes in the world, not with broadcasting, but with a pocket sized weekly that told America every night what was on TV.
This brings us to the end of number 67 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when television becomes interactive for the first time, but not in the way you might be thinking.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and ha. But ho ho ho, who got to laugh at us now.
