NIELSEN KEEPS SWEEPS FOR L.A. STATIONS.

Byline: - Valerie Kuklenski

They're everywhere this time of year, those special TV reports on everything from the latest wrinkle treatments and fat-melting pills to vital child safety matters.

TV stations care about attracting viewers all year, of course, but more so in the months of February, May and November, when Nielsen Media Research conducts its ratings sweeps.

And while sweeps may become a thing of the past for networks, they are here to stay in local markets for the next several years, insiders say.

Virginia Hunt, program director of KCBS (Channel 2) and KCAL (Channel 9), said year-round monitoring would be possible when Nielsen does away with weekly paper diaries and goes all-electronic in about 800 homes in the Los Angeles viewing area on April 8. But Nielsen still will maintain its sweeps calendar in local markets.

Hunt says the prospect of eliminating sweeps periods is not advantageous to stations or advertisers.

``It will be a huge cultural change,'' she said, noting the difficulty for commercial buyers to weigh one station's ``stunt'' program against another's low-end rerun, a situation that would happen often if there were no designated periods for ratings measurement.

Los Angeles is and will continue to be a very competitive market for local news, where seven stations scramble for segments of 14.8 million viewers in 5.5 million television households. News programming is the stations' primary source of revenue.

Hunt said she sees news divisions working up investigative stories and other appealing packages throughout the year rather than just for sweeps because of their need for a loyal audience.

``News is even more important today,'' she said. ``It's your premier identity piece. You can catch 'Law & Order' on how many different outlets? As they repurpose and repackage series to cable, it's harder to maintain viewers' association of a given show with your network.''