TV Guide Taps Brit Birch

MAGAZINES By Lisa Granatstein

I an Birch, the British editorial director of Emap's popular celebrity and entertainment weeklies Heat and Closer, will have to hit the ground running when he joins TV Guide as editor in chief on Oct. 18.

The struggling, 9 million-circulation TV-listings weekly will have been without a top editor since May, when Men's Health veteran Mike Lafavore left after 15 months at the helm.

Not only will Birch be involved in sprucing up the weekly by better integrating the features section with the listings and adding more color pages—he also will test, and possibly launch, TV Guide spin-offs next year. In fact, it was the latter task that inspired John Loughlin, TV Guide Publishing Group president, to approach Birch.

"I originally started to chat with him almost 10 months ago about some magazine-development concepts," said Loughlin. "He declined because of his job with Emap."

Birch knows a thing or two about the U.S. marketplace. In 1990, he was tapped by Wenner Media to transform Us magazine from a biweekly to a monthly (the title now publishes weekly).

Then, in 1993, he was lured by Emap, where he worked for a special U.K. joint venture between Hachette Filipacchi Media and Emap, overseeing Elle and Elle Decor. Birch also conceived Red, a glossy lifestyle monthly.

One Wenner veteran noted that he is a "pretty smart packager of magazines" and speculated that TV Guide could be headed for a celebrity makeover á la Us or American Media Inc.'s Star.

Birch insisted that is not going to happen. "Celebrities are important and they're clearly very central to certain shows, but they're not as immediately core to a television magazine as a classic celebrity magazine," he said.

Birch will also be busy trying to integrate the magazine's listings with its burgeoning Web site. "As channels continue to grow, we're also going to work towards tighter integration between print and the online product," said Loughlin. "The Web will pick up a larger and larger component of the data part of the magazine."