About
Who makes ShowPrepPro
Somebody writes your prep. You ought to know who.
I'm Mark Shannon. I've been on the air since 1983 and I'm still doing a morning show — that's the whole qualification, and around here it's the only one that counts. Everything in this product is a fix for something that went wrong on me during a real shift.
Forty-three years, mostly in small markets
I started at WGUD in Pascagoula in 1983. I was twelve. I told them I was eighteen. After that it was the Gulf Coast — Mobile, Pensacola, Biloxi, Gulfport — on the air first, then music director, then program director, then station manager. Country, Top 40 and greatest hits, which between them cover just about everything a small-market jock ever gets asked to do.
There's a gap in the middle of that. I left the air in 2005 and didn't come back until 2022 — middays first, then mornings. The years in between were voiceover out of my own studio, commercial and imaging and narration, plus twelve years as a global vendor manager at a company that had nothing to do with radio. Both of those turned out to matter. The first is why every word in here is written to be said instead of read. The second is why it actually ships.
I run a station. This is what I built for it
Since 2023 I've owned and programmed Power88.FM, a digital station on the I-80 corridor in California, and I do the morning show on it. ShowPrepPro started out as my own prep. It became a product because the alternative — a document in your inbox at 5am, a hundred confident sentences and not one link — is what everybody else in a small market is putting up with too.
That's where the rules come from. Two independent sources on every factual item, both linked and both dated, because I'm the one who'd have to correct it on the air. A break builder that counts the clock, because I've run forty seconds long. Reading copy in big type, because a 12-point Word file at 5am is something you decode, not something you read.
What I'm not claiming
- No engineer's license. Never had one, won't pretend otherwise.
- No computer science degree and no bootcamp. The software here — this, plus traffic and billing software and an FCC compliance kit — is self-taught, and I'd rather say so than have you find out.
- No awards wall. Forty-three years of shifts is the claim, and it's enough of one.
You can actually reach me
Not through a form that goes nowhere. The address at the bottom of every page reaches a person, and that person is usually me. If something in an edition is wrong, tell me — you'll get it fixed and you'll get an answer.