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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Walter Annenberg’s impact on 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 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 forays into broadcasting, 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 MacFadden 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 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 market for a dedicated guide.

We’re Gonna Need a Map

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 road map 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 the 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 ten 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, Jr. 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.

The First Fall Preview

Later that year, for the September 26-to-October 2, 1953 edition,  TV Guide published its first “Fall Preview” issue, establishing a cultural cycle that would last for decades. Until that point, 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 the country, 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 readers each week. By the mid-1970s, its circulation climbed to nearly 20 million. 

Prior to TV Guide, the most popular magazine in America was 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. 

A Man of Wealth and Taste

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’s, serving as Nixon’s envoy to Britain. In later years, he donated billions to schools, museums, and the arts. His gifts have funded institutions like the Annenberg School for Communication at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California. 

Thanks largely to TV Guide, Walter Annenberg was consistently listed among the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans. In 1988, he sold Triangle Publications to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in a deal that was valued at $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, he’d 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. 

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