And the Winner Is . . . News Magazines : Television: Network news shows register ratings gains while many prime-time entertainment series are losing viewers.

There is good news for news in the Nielsen ratings. At a time when many prime-time entertainment series are losing audience to cable and other TV competitors, the four network news magazines have registered an increase in their ratings in the last year.

One of them, CBS’ venerable “60 Minutes,” is the season’s top-rated series to date, with ratings 1.4% ahead of last year.

CBS’ “48 Hours,” meanwhile, is up 45% over a year ago. ABC’s “20/20” is 9% higher and regularly wins its Friday night time period, and the network’s younger news magazine, “PrimeTime Live,” has improved its ratings by 10% this year.

Compare that to a drop in ratings of 2% for the average returning prime-time show during the last year and you’ve got Don Hewitt, creator and executive producer of “60 Minutes,” suggesting, “We’ve had the year of the nurses and the year of the doctor in prime-time shows--maybe this is the year of the news magazine.”

Explanations for this phenomenon range from changing viewer tastes to a decline in the quality of entertainment programming.

“Maybe everything else on TV is so bad, or maybe everybody’s out watching ‘The Addams Family’ at the movies and nobody’s left watching TV but serious viewers,” Hewitt quipped.

David Poltrack, vice president of research at CBS, theorized that the news magazines, whose core audience is adults, may be benefiting from the fact that the large Baby Boom population is moving into its 40s.

“People in their 40s watch significantly more news and information programming than people in their 30s,” he said. “This major blip in the population is entering that stage of life, and that makes the TV environment more conducive to news and information programming.”

Hewitt speculated that the growing popularity of the news magazines may reflect the public’s increased appetite for “reality” programming.

“TV movies and sitcoms today are borrowing on real-life situations and stories on abortion, drugs and other issues, and it is difficult today to know where truth ends and the make-believe begins,” he said. “As entertainment becomes more reality-based, reality seems to be more appealing. When people watch ’60 Minutes’ or ‘20/20’ or ‘PrimeTime Live,’ I think they realize that we’re not mixing in a lot of fiction with it.”

Viewers, however, do know that they’re going to see programs that use some of the techniques of entertainment, such as focusing on interesting characters more than issues. The recent increase in the ratings for news magazines has not been paralleled by an increase in ratings for the network evening newscasts.

“I don’t think this trend signals a growing appetite for news in the traditional journalistic sense of what happened today around the world,” said Andrew Heyward, executive producer of “48 Hours.” “The successful news magazines have found a way to tell stories that are journalistically accurate but also dramatically appealing.”

In addition, Heyward noted, “It’s harder today to get an increasingly fickle audience to sample a new entertainment show where they have to get to know the characters. News magazines are built around individual segments, and news has a way of feeling fresh when other genres look tired.”

“Younger viewers today have so many more options that they’re less likely to commit to a prime-time drama,” agreed Larry Hyams, director of audience research for Capital Cities/ABC. “When ‘PrimeTime Live’ has a story like its recent expose on day-care or the interview (with Patricia Bowman, the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her), it draws in additional younger viewers as well as its regular audience.”

That is not to say that creating a successful news magazine is easy. NBC has tried 17 unsuccessful news magazines over the years, and its two most recent efforts--”Real Life With Jane Pauley” and “Expose”--landed at the bottom of the Nielsens against CBS’ “Murder, She Wrote.” NBC is combining elements of the two previous half-hour shows and has signed “20/20” correspondent Stone Phillips to co-anchor a new venture this spring with Pauley.

CBS will take a whack at another prime-time news magazine on Jan. 9 when it gives a four-week tryout to a “48 Hours” spinoff called “Street Stories.” The program, described as featuring gritty, real-life dramas, will be anchored by “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley. “Street Stories” will be considered for a permanent prime-time slot if the first installments do well in the ratings.

The financial pay-off for a successful prime-time news magazine can be enormous. A news magazine costs about $450,000 per episode to produce--half of what’s needed for a prime-time entertainment hour--and the network owns the show because its made within the news division.

“The name of the game for networks is still finding breakaway hits in entertainment,” said CBS’ Heyward. “But I think we’ve gone beyond the day when a new prime-time news magazine was expected to be No. 3 in its time slot but was tolerated there because it was an alternative to entertainment and cheap to produce.”