Steven Reddicliffe, the TV editor of The New York Times responds to this question from a reader:
Q. Any chance of resuming publishing the Sunday weekly TV booklet? I stopped buying the Sunday Times since its disappearance. It was always a very important service to your readers.
A. We heard from a number of readers about the discontinuation of the Sunday TV book, and we appreciate the opportunity to explain that decision further. One of the reasons the section was discontinued was that the number of channels offered by cable providers in the New York area exceeded the capacity of the book; we simply couldn’t list everything that viewers would be interested in. So, the decision was made to cease publication of the Sunday book, and add a full page of television listings and highlights (the What’s On Tonight column) to Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section. (Savings from discontinuing the Sunday TV book help fund our extensive foreign reporting, and other journalism.) And NYTimes.com has proved to be a great medium for listings information, offering program schedules for all available digital and analog cable channels; a grid that can be customized by ZIP code and cable or satellite provider; and detailed information on shows and episodes.
We recently added the What’s on Tonight column to the TV section online. This is the same column that appears daily in the paper adjacent to the print TV grid. In coming months, more tools and features, including The Times’s own movie capsules, will be added.
Amen.
