BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. TV was hot last Wednesday night. On ABC Barbara Walters chatted up accused wife murderer Robert Blake while CBS snagged Robert Chambers, the so-called "preppie killer" and Dan Rather sat down with Saddam. America's most wanted seemed to be cluttering up the airwaves -- and why? -- Wednesday was the last day of a four-times-a-year tradition called Sweeps Week. Earlier the sweeps served up the freakish delights of Michael Jackson and Joe Millionaire, which by the way pulled much better ratings than Saddam. During these months, data on viewing habits around the country are collected and used to set prices for advertising. The New Yorker's James Surowiecki has 3 criticisms of the sweeps. They are as follows: "One - they are deeply flawed and of little use, in the end, to the networks, the advertisers, and the viewers. Two - everyone in television knows this. And Three - no one has done anything about it." James, welcome back!
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Thanks for having me on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the sweeps system originated in radio almost 50 years ago; that's-- the paleolithic era on media years, so give us the basics on how it works.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well the way it works is during each sweeps month Nielsen Media Research sends out something close to a million paper diaries and they send them to, you know, selected homes. It's supposed to be a random sample. And they basically ask people for one week to fill out on this diary everything they watch during that week. And the theory is that what that will allow local advertisers to do is figure out how much they should spend on local advertising, because they will have information not just about what people are watching but also about who's watching what.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So now let's go through your points, one by one. Why are sweeps no good for the networks?
JAMES SUROWIECKI:From the networks' perspective they basically have to pack all of their good or - I mean "good" maybe should be in quotes here if you [LAUGHTER] think about things like Joe Millionaire, but all of the high profile programming into these four months, and they have to spend a lot of money promoting these shows, and that means that through most of the year they have to sprinkle re-runs all, all over the place.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why isn't it any good for the advertisers?
JAMES SUROWIECKI:There, there, there are two problems -- one is that there are real questions about how accurate these diaries are. People don't do this as - you know - as they're watching --like all of us, they procrastinate - they wait till the end of the week, and then they try to remember what they're watching. So that skews the diaries in one direction. The other thing is that the response rate to these diaries is very small; in other words of all the diaries Nielsen sends out, only something like 30 percent are actually filled out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, so in your column, after you've finished trashing the entire system, [LAUGHTER] you do suggest an alternative which is very nice of you -- the Nielsen People Meters.
JAMES SUROWIECKI:Well let me explain just for a second how they work. Basically there are 5,000 homes in America that now have people meters. When you are watching a show you're supposed to log in, so they know what everyone in the house is watching. So they get this demographic data. And, and that's the information that the networks use to set their national advertising. The real problem is that even though it would make sense to move the entire country to a people meter system, on, on the local level it just doesn't make sense for, you know, a local affiliate to pay to have the homes wired for people meters, and there are two reasons for that. One is that the local advertising markets are probably too small to justify the expense, and the second is that a lot of local affiliates I think don't actually want accurate numbers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So even though the viewers, the networks and the advertisers are the losers when it comes to using the paper system, the affiliates do seem to derive some benefit from it.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Yeah, they do, and one obvious reason is again if you go back to people filling out the diaries, if you think about how people remember -- they're more likely to remember high-profile programs; they're more likely to remember the networks. You know if you're thinking what did I watch on Wednesday --you're probably more likely to put down a network show than, you know, that Discovery Channel show that you happened to catch. And in that sense, the networks really benefit. And in fact whenever people meters have been introduced, the affiliates' ratings have dropped. And, and this is really important because the people that pay for sweeps - in other words literally pay for the data to be collected - are the affiliates. They're paying for it; it's in their interest -- so it's probably not surprising that it hasn't changed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So we're stuck with a system that was born in the days of Milton Berle, and it's distorting the programming we see; it's distorting advertising rates, and it isn't going to change.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: No. The, the only prospect of hope I think is that Nielsen is in the process of installing people meters in 25 markets, and it's going to be a very slow rollout. They say they will have it done by 2010. If that happens, then I think the system will probably be -- obviously not overturned, but it will be modified in important ways, because at least for 25 major markets you will have this concrete information.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I have to tell you the reason why we really wanted to call you about this piece is because we loved the last line so much. [LAUGHTER] It was a beautiful play on the-- on the old time expression, "the revolution will not be televised."
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Right. Yeah, the television will not be revolutionized, and, and that is in fact [LAUGHS] what, what, what we're dealing with.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: James Surowiecki, thank you very much!
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Thanks for having me on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: James Surowiecki writes the financial page in the New Yorker. [MUSIC]