New ratings meter could alter TV news: without sweeps, the need for over-the-top newscasts might go away for good.

IS the push by local news departments to produce sexy and sensational stories during the local sweeps period three times a year becoming a thing of the past?

A new system for measuring television audiences, launched by Nielsen Media Research in Los Angeles this month, raises that possibility as local news directors consider how to present their special reports at times other than February, May and November.

"We've been trying to get out of that game for a long time. We promote on-air, and outside, year-round," said Paula Madison, president and general manager of KNBC (Channel 4) in Burbank.

"If it's news, it's news. Whatever rises to the level of a good news story will happen year round, and not just (the sweeps months)," she said.

Adjusting those resources is only one of the possibilities arising from the use of a new television-audience monitoring system called "Local People Meters," or "LPMs," that has been developed by Nielsen, a unit of Dutch publishing company VNU NV, and which has been under attack for undercounting minority viewers.

The system has been rolled out in Los Angeles, New York and Boston, and Nielsen plans to bring it to Chicago and San Francisco later this year--and other large markets by the end of next year. The meters replace the diary-based system in use since 1950 that requires viewers to write down what they watch.

Counting minorities

The new people meters are not without controversy. A confidential audit of Nielsen's new system found that as many as one-fourth of all African-American homes and one-fifth of Hispanic homes were not being counted on any given night. The Media Rating Council, an industry group, conducted the audit and has withheld accrediting the new system.

"It's clear Nielsen needs a big fix, and we should look more closely at how to make it a better system," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, told a Senate Commerce subcommittee last week.

The new technology will shift audience measurements and, ultimately, advertising dollars. Nielsen now plans to generate local ratings daily with the people meters installed in about 800 homes in the L.A. area. The meters electronically record who is watching what programs--removing any uncertainty about whether the viewers' diaries were accurate.

There will be a transitional period through early August where the demographic data from the people meters will be collected concurrently with the diaries to provide for a "smoother changeover" to the new system, said Matt Tatham, a spokesman for Nielsen.

Eventually, "there won't be so much of a need for sweeps because you will be getting demographic information every day of the year," he said.

Some local affiliates see opportunities for building market share with their news operations.

"Obviously, the people meters will help with programming decisions, and will allow us to look at demographics more quickly than waiting for a ratings period to be over," said Vinnie Malcolm, vice president and general manager at Tribune Co.-owned KTLA (Channel 5)

"With the new system, the idea of sweeps products will go by the wayside," Malcolm said. "We need to be enterprising to find news stories that are relevant."

Breaking the sweeps habit

Robert L. Long, vice president and news director at KNBC, thinks downplaying sweeps is a good thing. "Some will continue to compete at these artificial times of the year. It's a hard habit to break," Long said.

"Sweeps have forced some local news operations to play that game, where you do news intensively three months out of the year," he explained. "You get good stuff three months, then you go to a scorched earth policy the rest of the year."

But ratings expert Thomas Hollihan, a professor of communications at USC's Annenberg School for Journalism, is bracing for more car chases.

His reasons are rooted in a belief that Nielson's old diary system tended to distort the demographic data collected on local news viewing trends.

"Viewers filling out the diaries have tended to be mindful of saying they watch socially minded programs, like watching local news," Hollihan said. "They fill out the log at the end of the day, or week, and there is a tendency to say you watch news. The people meters may demonstrate that some of the ratings on local news have been inflated."

With the real-time data, Hollihan said, pressure could intensify over what stories draw public attention, and lead to an increase in the reporting of certain kinds of stories that hold viewers' attention. "This means we could see more dirty restaurant stories, stories about housewives having affairs, car chases, more Laci Peterson trial stories and other titillating things," he said.

Bloomberg News contributed to this story.