Trending topics: not just for Twitter anymore! And just in time for traditional broadcast media, probably, as the Portable People Meters rolled out by the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement are providing new context to how their transmissions get covered. How else to know that women actually tune into sports radio — along with formats less likely to have engendered sharpening a pencil and filling out a diary, per the old system, which paid a toonie in guilt-inducing compensation. Now, a pager-sized device — not necessarily as illustrated on the BBM website with googly eyes, a smiling mouth, and flexed muscles — picks up sound waves heard anywhere, until it gets docked for the night. Recent revelations through this system include a better sense of how many parents watch TV with their kids, that an estimated 397,000 Canadians can tolerate The Jay Leno Show — compared to 2.4 million for Dancing With the Stars — and that CBC Television’s prime-time may not be so doomed after all save for The Border, and The Hour. Ratings for television have shot up by 23 per cent this fall thanks to the new system. Radio stations, meanwhile, have been given their own story to spin: hasty programming and branding changes at Newstalk 1010 this month were a reaction to the summer trial PPM numbers that showed it sinking faster than previously guesstimated. September stats for the 25-54 demographic, in a sidebar printed in the Toronto Sun, showed 17.5 per cent of morning show listening was to 104.5 CHUM FM — reinforcing that lite hip-hop is the new adult contemporary — while no device wearer in that age group was tuned into the CP24 simulcast on 1050 CHUM, even by accident.