NETWORKS STACK UP NEWSMAGAZINES; RATINGS BOOST PUTS 'EM ON FOR 10 HOURS : REALITY CHECK.

Byline: Keith Marder Daily News Television Writer

Don't look now, but ``60 Minutes'' has turned into 600. Come this fall, there will be 10 newsmagazines in the prime-time lineups of the three major networks, representing more than 15 percent of the schedule.

This trend hasn't gone unnoticed. When NBC announced its fall lineup to advertisers, ``Friends'' star Matthew Perry made the crack that he had to get on stage at the press conference quickly - before they replaced him with another hour of ``Dateline.''

And audiences are responding positively. Four of the top five prime-time programs for the week ending Sunday were newsmagazines: ``Dateline NBC - Tuesday,'' ``60 Minutes,'' ``Dateline NBC - Monday'' and ``PrimeTime Live'' were at the top, with ``Touched by an Angel'' in the No. 4 spot. The news programs are drawing especially well now during rerun season.

Now, the three main networks have each added an hour of such programming for the fall.

Peter Tortorici, who headed CBS from April '94 to June '95, once called newsmagazines a dead format. So why are they blossoming? The obvious reason is that newsmagazines make money. They can be produced for a fraction of what it costs to program an hourlong drama. Even with the need for 40 original hours of programming for a newsmagazine show, compared with 22 to 25 fresh shows for a drama, the newsmagazines are profitable.

They also are effective as counter-programming. For instance, both CBS and ABC use the programs as place-holders against ratings king ``ER,'' which they figure they can't beat anyway.

People watch them: 113.9 million viewers tuned in weekly last season, resulting in respectable top-30 spots in the final, complete-season Nielsen ratings: ``60 Minutes'' (11th), ``20/20'' (12th), ``PrimeTime Live'' (23rd) and ``Dateline NBC - Tuesday'' (27th).

They also give shrinking network news departments a chance to shore up content in other ways, by doing in-depth or different stories than you see on the nightly news.

NBC began a model, which was copied by ABC this year, in cloning its ``Dateline'' franchise. There are now four ``Datelines'' - Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. ABC added a Thursday night ``20/20,'' to go along with the show's Friday installment, as well as an hour of ``PrimeTime Live'' on Wednesday.

CBS went in another direction. It will add star power and a totally new show to its established ``48 Hours'' and ``60 Minutes,'' which debuted in 1968 and is the longest-running prime-time show on television. Former ``Today'' host Bryant Gumbel will anchor a (yet unnamed) show at 9 p.m. Wednesday nights.

``I think as long as there are compelling stories to tell, there will be an audience for this,'' said Neal Shapiro, executive producer of ``Dateline.'' ``I don't know exactly how many hours, but as a genre, newsmagazines are here to stay.''

It's Shapiro who can be credited for the latest surge. Not only did he prove that a newsmagazine show can work on multiple nights of the week, he also resurrected the format after its darkest hour. Shapiro was brought in by NBC to turn around ``Dateline'' after the show admitted to rigging a fake explosion of a General Motors truck to make a point in a November 1992 segment.

Now ``Dateline'' probably puts the most news in its newsmagazine, and Shapiro would like to think that watching his show is like getting Time, Newsweek or U.S. News & World Report four times a week.

Different strokes

Each of the shows is distinctive, which allows them to cohabitate on the same television schedule.

ABC's shows tend to be more celebrity-oriented, and CBS' ``60 Minutes,'' although tweaked at times, has remained true to itself over the years with three well-told stories, some form of commentary and a stopwatch that has never gone digital.

The new show on CBS, which will be anchored by Gumbel, does not yet have a definite format, but will use the host's skills as an interviewer.

``Nobody reinvents the wheel,'' Gumbel said. ``To a certain extent, every car has four wheels, an engine and an exhaust. But it's like looking at a Ferrari and a Ford Taurus and calling them both cars. There are certain elements that will be common to all of them. Everybody looks at what they do well and what they don't do well.''

Gumbel said that he chose to helm ``what is commonly referred to as a newsmagazine'' after 15 years of ``Today'' because the morning show set him up to be either an evening news anchor or magazine show host.

``I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a daunting ton of work to try to do it and make it work and try to make it different,'' said Gumbel, who admits that he's not a prime-time television viewer.

The secret to success and good viewer turnout is storytelling, which is not much different than the secrets behind dramas such as ``NYPD Blue'' or ``ER.'' ``This puts a story into context,'' said Jonathan C. Klein, executive vice president of CBS News. ``It turns it into a narrative or a drama. The producers recognize drama.''

Shapiro agreed.

``I think what people like about newsmagazines is the variety,'' he said. ``It's not a single-topic show. They get stories that they care about and affect their lives and get to experience them being told like a story. There are interesting characters caught in some difficult situation with some resolution, and you can't wait for that, which would be common in any story. Oftentimes, the issue personally affects you, such as a woman's battle with breast cancer. And it's all true.''

Secrets to success

``60 Minutes'' executive producer Don Hewitt declined to be interviewed for this report, but he is quoted in a book titled ``Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today'' as saying, ``I think people watch `60 Minutes' because they're interested in seeing Morley (Safer), Dan (Rather) and Mike (Wallace) pursue a story, just as they like to see Kojak.''

With three all-news channels and some public-affairs channels such as C-SPAN on many cable systems, viewers have become more aware and savvy news junkies. Names such as Mark Fuhrman, Timothy McVeigh, the Ramseys of Colorado and Richard Jewell have become well-known. Viewers thirst for more information about them and the stories they are known for.

The newsmagazine offers a platform to tell stories that can be up to a full hour or even multipart. Long chunks of press conferences can be aired, as opposed to sound bites, and people - not necessarily newsmakers - in extraordinary circumstances who are not famous enough to make the evening news can also receive well-deserved coverage.

Although the shows do not, for obvious reasons, repeat well, updates of stories are popular.

``Viewers often wonder whatever happened to a story,'' Klein said. ``On a newscast, they take center stage and it's life or death, then drop it.''

Klein says that there is an ``endless supply'' of stories ripe for the plethora of newsmagazines.

No matter what, be it a celebrity profile, a courageous civilian, news analysis or interesting tale, there does not seem to be any shortage of stories to fill the 600 minutes, and maybe more.

The 10 shows next year ties the previous high of 1993, when the long-running regulars were joined by such shows as CBS' ``Eye to Eye With Connie Chung,'' NBC's ``Now With Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric'' and ABC's ``Day One,'' none of which are still on.

There may never be another ``60 Minutes,'' which was the first show to make the reporter part of the story and has been a top-10 show for two decades, but newsmagazines will continue to make money and be scattered across the schedule.

Just as the highly rated prime-time comedy ``Friends'' has led to a gaggle of rip-offs, the success of ``60 Minutes'' has spawned imitators galore.

And now there are 10.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) No caption (Several newsmagazine tv shows)

(2--Cover--Color) Networks packing prime time with 10 hoWurs of newsmagazines