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by Jeremiah Britt on December 16th, 2004

Jeremiah Britt

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Where do newspapers get their television listings?

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  • by Humptydank on December 21st, 2004

    Humptydank

    The most common way that newspapers get their TV listings in the United States is to buy them from a television listing service. One of the largest is Tribune Media Services in Chicago. (tms.tribune.com) They maintain a truly huge set of databases that detail every broadcast and cable network and local television station and cable company, their geographic coverage, what channels they carry, and what's on each channel.

    Customers specify just the data set they need (such as a week of listings for New York-area broadcast and cable networks), pay only for that section of data, and download that information from private ftp sites. All datasets are updated nightly with any new information.

    You'd probably be amazed at how many places you see Tribune data: Web sites, cable network sites, Tivo, on-screen guides, it's everywhere. When I worked for a cable network we would pay close to 8 thousand dollars a month to buy *our own* schedule listings back from Tribune, because using their data set we could allow web site users to find out the name of their local cable company by zip code, and know exactly which of our cable channels that system carried.

    And how does Tribune get the data? The hard way. They have a large staff devoted to keep the all databases accurate. Most broadcasters know how widely used they are and send them their changes automatically, but they also have staff members who continually call stations to verify their information is correct.

    Hope that helps!

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