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Archive a show, and get the whole morning back
What you said, the copy you read it from, and the recording of you saying it, kept together under one reference. How closing a day works, and why it clears your desk.
Somebody is going to ask you what you said.
Sometimes it’s friendly — a listener remembers a bit and wants the name of the book. Sometimes it’s a program director. Occasionally it’s a lawyer, or a sales manager who promised a client a mention and needs to know it happened.
Whoever is asking, the question is the same shape: on the fourteenth, in the seven o’clock hour, what actually went out?
Most hosts can’t answer it. Not because they did anything wrong, but because a
morning show doesn’t exist anywhere after it happens. The prep was in one place,
the notes were in another, the words came out of your mouth once, and the
recording — if there’s a recording — is on a hard drive in a rack, named
2026-02-14-0700.mp3, alongside nine hundred others.
What archiving a day does
In ShowPrepPro, a day is a thing you can close.
Name the show, press Close the show, and everything that belonged to that morning is filed together and kept:
- Every break, in the copy that actually went out — frozen as it was, not regenerated later from the same sources.
- Your own notes for that day, from your Material.
- The airchecks from that morning, playable in the page.
It gets a reference built from your call letters and the date — KQRD-20260214
— and that’s the bit that matters more than it looks. It’s readable. You can
write it on a note, type it into the search box, or say it down the phone to a
program director without spelling anything. A random string would have
satisfied the database and nobody else.
And it clears the desk
This is the half people don’t expect, and it’s the reason to close a day even when nobody is ever going to ask about it.
Before archiving existed, the end of a show left you with a pile: breaks with yesterday’s date on them, notes stacked in your Material, all of it still sitting there tomorrow morning underneath the new prep. The only way to start clean was to go in and delete the text out of each story by hand, which is a chore nobody does twice.
Archiving moves the day rather than flagging it. The breaks come off your Breaks list, the dated notes come out of your Material, and tomorrow starts empty — without a word of it being destroyed. It’s all on the show’s page, for as long as you’ve an account.
One deliberate exception: anything without a date on it stays. The bit you reuse every Friday, the standing liner, the contest rules — those belong to no single day, and sweeping them up would be destroying the exact thing you keep them for.
Getting one back
Body of Work in the menu lists every show you’ve closed, newest first, with the date, the title, how many breaks are in it and how many airchecks. Search by date, by title, or by that reference.
Open one and you get the morning as it was: each break, each element in the copy you read, your notes, and a player for every clip from that day. There are Download .docx and Download .pdf buttons, because sometimes the person asking needs a file rather than a link.
One show at a time, because a single day is a host checking their own work. When you want the lot (moving on, or just keeping a copy), Take everything with you under your account puts every show, aircheck, reel and piece of your material in one download.
An archived show is locked
Once a day is closed, its breaks can’t be edited or deleted, and the show can’t be renamed.
That isn’t fussiness. The archive is a record of what went out, and a record you can quietly rewrite in March isn’t a record — it’s a draft with a date on it. If the sales manager asks whether the client got their mention on the fourteenth, the answer has to be the fourteenth’s answer.
If you archived the wrong day, or a day of tests, you can delete the whole show. That gives the work back rather than destroying it: the breaks return to your Breaks list, your notes return to your Material, both editable again, and the airchecks are left alone.
The habit worth building
Close the show when you get out of the chair. It takes one press and it’s the difference between a year of radio you can point at and a year you can only describe.
Nobody has ever regretted being able to answer what did I say on the fourteenth.
The archive is part of ShowPrepPro, daily show prep for radio — every item sourced twice, in big type for the air, with airchecking built in.