A Loyal Reader Asks:
“Why is the morning program the only time of the broadcasting day that’s addressed by show prep services? I work afternoon drive and find myself having to adopt and adjust most of the humor because it’s written/slanted to the morning programming/presentation.
“I understand that it’s the morning portion of any radio station that sets the precedence for the day’s broadcasting. It’s the morning show/ personality that first relates to the listeners and it’s their job to get things rolling. It’s when you can first talk about what happened the day before because it’s fresh. And it’s when you can relate to what’s in store for today because it’s early in the day and expectations are high.
“But what about the rest of the broadcasting day? It’s just as important for the midday and afternoon drive to keep them, and entertain them. I constantly feel left at the altar when it comes to things I can choose from and use in my show.
“Now I may be wrong. Perhaps there’s a wealth of smartly written prep directed to the afternoon drive floating around out there some place and I just haven’t found it yet. If so, would you kindly direct me to it? It would be nice to have other things to say and relate to that’s not been rewritten or adjusted from the leftover morning stuff I find.”
My Reply:
I don’t believe it’s’s accurate to say that most prep services are predominantly for morning shows. The good prep services offer information and ideas that can be adapted by any air shift. Very little of the material I see has a “mornings only” orientation.
All prep material must be adapted by the user if it’s to be used effectively and wisely.
Listeners want to be entertained, often in some way informed, regardless of daypart.
An afternoon show might have to do more “looking ahead” than a morning show, which can spend more time “looking backward” at the previous night’s entertainment news.
But other than entertainment news, afternoon prep has an advantage over morning prep because before you begin your shift, nearly a full business day has passed, and lots of stuff has happened that simply was not available to that day’s morning show.
It’s your job to adapt the materials from your prep services to fit your own style & audience as well as to add your own personal takes on whatever has happened in the day’s news.
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I voicetrack a network overnight show and haven’t found a reliable source of “next day” info – TV stuff, birthdays, etc. – that I can incorporate. I record my show 10 hours before it airs and I wind up sticking to music/artist info and any “lifestyle” prep I can find. Management wants me to stay away from “odd” news, which I used to enjoy using. Any tips or advice?
If this sounds snarky, I apologize. If you’re looking for great prep for ANY daypart, you can freely use the same source that the prep guys are using, AND quite possibly trump them in the process. The internet. We have two prep services and I use them only for the audio clips they provide. But all other content comes from things I’ve gleaned from news and info sites on the net. And invariably many of the things I use will turn up in our prep services a couple of days later. MSNBC, TMZ, Drudge etc. are all great sources for prep and they’re the places the prep guys get their info. All Access’ Net News is a fantastic resource for Country Music prep. And it’s free! My local newspaper’s online content is horrible (their real world content is as well) but the i-sites for our three local TV stations are great sources. Major metro area newspapers online are fantastic resources. Even Facebook. I found out Doug Fieger passed because someone posted the YouTube clip of “My Sharona” within seconds of his death being announced. I guess I was lucky in that early in my career I asked my boss for a prep service and he told me that if we did use the service, he’d reduce my salary by X amount of dollars. He told me showprep was part of my job. If he paid for a service, then I wasn’t doing that part of my job. He was joking but I got the message and learned how to find my own content. In the market I was in at that time, the only source for national content was USA Today. This inevitably meant referring to a story on air as “In USA Today today.” What I would’ve given for the internet back then.