LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: EFFORT CONTINUES TO GIVE READERS GOOD TV LISTINGS

Let's talk about television schedules.

Many of you have noticed recent changes in TV Update, the weekly TV magazine in each Friday's Southeast Missourian. And you don't like the changes.

Neither do I.

During the past few months you have repeatedly suggested that you want 24-hour listings. However, the space in TV Update hasn't been adequate to list all of the programs, particularly in the early-morning hours. So we have been looking for ways to give you good listings that are complete. To do this has meant some juggling in the book and how programs are listed.

TV Update has two kinds of listings. The first is in the familiar narrow columns that show the time followed by the channel numbers and the titles of the programs on those channels for that time period. These listings are called rolling logs. That's newspaper talk. But it is a good term to know as we discuss the listings.

The rolling logs sometimes have a bit of additional information about movies and some of the prime-time programs.

The second kind of listing in TV Update is in the daily boxes that cover the time period from 7 to 10:30 p.m. These boxes, one for each day of the week, are called grids. The grids are like a chart, with the times across the top and the channel numbers down the side. To find the program for a particular time slot, you start and the top and read down. To find the program for a particular channel, you start at the side at read across.

Recently, the cable channel numbers were dropped from the grids, and that caused a lot of confusion. Those numbers have been restored for the Cape Girardeau and Scott County cable systems to make it easier to tune in your television.

Even more recently, we asked the TV Update folks to help us with a format for the magazine that would include 24-hours listings, since that is what you have asked for so often.

One way to do that is to eliminate the duplication for the prime-time show in the grid and the rolling logs. However, as you have seen the past two weeks, the arrangement of the listings has been terribly confusing and hard to follow. No one is happy with the new arrangement, and we have told TV Update how unhappy our readers are. The magazine's publisher, Print Marketing Concepts Inc., in return has promised to make improvements. But they take time. They hope to have some of the improvements ready in time for next week's book. I certainly hope so.

One of the things we want to try to do is make sure you have access to movie descriptions. The TV Update folks think they can include these in the book. If not, we will try to find a way to run the movie descriptions each day at the top of the comics page where we currently run the program updates.

I know many of you miss the daily prime-time grids on the comics page. But we have found that most of our subscribers rely on TV Update and keep it handy all week long as a reference. One way we gauge the importance of the weekly TV book is through sales of the Friday paper. They go up significantly, because TV Update is there. This is typical for newspapers across the country.

Thank you for being concerned about the TV listings. Most of you have been patient and understanding, and I appreciate that. Be assured that we are working on this and want to find a way to give you what you are asking for.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.