Local TV Prepares for the Invasion of the People Meters

"Nielsen is not investing properly in people on the ground to go out in minority communities and make sure that viewers are comfortable with the technology, [that] they understand it and how to implement it," says Josh Lahey, a spokesman for Don't Count Us Out. The group is funded by News Corp.

Washington news chiefs are hunkering down for the new system and have begun grappling with the daunting notion that every day is sweeps day. "You need to get people aware of you every single day," Bill Lord, WJLA vice president of news, said about the new ratings system. "Their behavior is going to be recorded," he said, so the ratings won't be based on what a viewer thought he watched last week via a diary.

"There will be more pressure to consistently be good," said Darryll Green, WUSA president and general manager. "We have to be good every single day."

WJLA has been broadcasting stories usually reserved for sweeps almost every day for the past year in anticipation of the new ratings system. "We planned well in advance for this . . . so that we would be in a rotation of having a sweeps mentality, for lack of a better term, year-round," Lord said.

Last year, WJLA revived its old "I-Team" by reassigning local Emmy-winner Andrea McCarren as its main investigative reporter. Many of the I-Team reports seem tailor-made for sweeps periods, such as a story last year on immigrant gangs in Virginia.

WRC's vice president of news, Vickie Burns, who said her station's "Exploding Cell Phones" report was not a sweeps stunt, said the new ratings system is an opportunity to showcase and promote "highly produced" stories all year round. "Instead of clustering these good stories in a few months of the year, you're going to spread them out," she said. "It's going to only benefit the viewers. There won't be a lag or a wait. There will be good stuff delivered continuously 52 weeks a year."

Although Washington is adopting a year-round sweeps attitude, station executives stressed that the four-times-a-year sweeps bonanza will still be important. LPMs will be installed in the Top 10 markets by the end of 2006, but that leaves 70 percent of the country relying on the diary system to set their ad rates.

"I don't think sweeps are going away in terms of how networks program," Loftus said. "You still have to program for all those affiliates out there."

"I don't think it will go away entirely, this concept of sweeps," said WRC's Burns.

Matt Ellis, news director of Boston's CBS-owned WBZ, has been living with LPMs for nearly three years and said his station still readies itself for the four sweeps period.

"Until the networks stop programming for the sweeps, we can't help but gear it up just a little bit more for those periods," Ellis said. "Because we've got to be in sync with the network."

Washington is relatively conservative compared with the "stunting" that goes on in other cities.

Last year, Cleveland anchor Sharon Reed of CBS affiliate WOIO took it all off to take part in a nude photographic installation in a report that ran during the November sweeps. The stunt worked, as the station garnered its highest ratings in five years for an 11 p.m. newscast. Broadcasting and Cable magazine noted this past February that both a Columbus, Ohio, reporter and a St. Louis reporter were shocked with high-voltage stun guns for stories on Tasers. "I do think [in Washington] we tend to stay away from some of that stuff," WJLA's Lord said.