TV Guide Editions in 1953

In my TV Guide dated Nov. 20, 1953, there's a full page ad suggesting you give TV Guide subscriptions as Christmas gifts. $5 a year for the first subscription, $4 for additional subscriptions and if you want a two-year deal it's $8, three years for $11. Here are the 16 editions listed...

-Baltimore-Washington (I wonder why Baltimore goes first?)
-Boston-New England (Providence, Portland, Hartford, New Haven, Springfield, New Bedford, Manchester, but not Bangor or Burlington)
-Chicago-Milwaukee (that's this edition)
-Cincinnati-Columbus-Dayton
-Cleveland-Lake Erie
-Denver (the only Mountain time zone edition)
-Detroit
-Iowa-Midwest (The term "Midwest" covers a lot of territory. I wonder what cities got included, or why this market is covered while so many larger ones aren't?)
-Los Angeles (I have an old LA TV Guide, which includes San Diego, Tijuana's Channel 6 and Santa Barbara)
-Minneapolis-St. Paul
-New York (which included Bridgeport and New Haven CT)
-Philadelphia
-Pittsburgh-Tri-State (which includes Wheeling WV and Steubenville Ohio)
-San Francisco
-Western New York-Ontario (I assume this includes Buffalo, Rochester and Toronto)
-Wilkes-Barre-Scranton-Binghamton

Interesting what's not included. Nothing in the South, not even Miami or Atlanta, no Dallas or Houston, no Seattle or Portland OR, no St. Louis or Kansas City.

Gregg. said:

-Chicago-Milwaukee (that's this edition)

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Were there other cities' stations (that had signed on in '53) other than Chicago and Milwaukee in that edition? Such as WCIA-3 Champaign, WHBF-4 Rock Island, WOC-5 (now KWQC-6) Davenport, WREX-13 Rockford, and MAYBE even the U's from Decatur (WTVP-17 now WAND), Springfield (WICS-20) and Peoria [WEEK-43 now 25, and WTVH (WHOI)-19]?

And I have also seen references (including in past retro TV listings on this board) to the Iowa edition of TV Guide carrying the Rockford stations in the '50s--maybe that edition was also distributed in northwestern Illinois at that time (making the '50s Iowa edition the only TVG local edition that carried Quad Cities and Rockford stations in the same issue--since there was and is a lot of areas in NW Illinois e.g., Sterling, Dixon, Mount Carroll that can receive both markets, so in later years who knows if northwestern IL would have received the Western Illinois edition or the Illinois-Wisconsin edition, unless subscribers there actually had a choice of editions to receive)?

gr8oldies said:

I was always curious how the various and sundry local editions of TV Guide were put together before computers.

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Believe it or not, according to the book "Changing Channels" by Glenn Altschuler and David Grossvogel, "a file card was kept with a plot summary of every film and every episode of a series." I can vouch for reading descriptions of movies or series episodes broadcast years apart that were identical.

When TV Guide first started, the bought up many regional issues that were being published by other entities, and that may be one way in which they expanded into the areas that weren't originally covered at the time of the magazine's launch. I'm sure that as markets became larger, i.e. served by more than one channel, that made them more attractive areas for TV Guide to move into.