Show prep for small-market radio, when you're the whole air staff

Most advice about show prep assumes an hour, a quiet room and nothing else to do. In a small market you've got twenty minutes, a sales meeting at ten and a remote to confirm — and if you're off sick, nobody's doing your prep, because there's nobody else.

That's a different problem from the one prep services usually get sold against, so here's the honest version of it.

The arithmetic

Prep is a time cost with a quality floor. Do it properly and a four-hour music show with three talk breaks an hour needs six to eight pieces of genuine content — a story, a bit, a question, a local angle — plus the liners, weather and contest mentions that aren't really prep at all.

Built from scratch, that's thirty to forty-five minutes a day for somebody who's quick at it. So:

• 40 minutes a day, five days: about 14 hours a month, all of it before your actual job starts.
• Cut to 15 minutes: roughly 8 hours a month back.
• At $19 a month, you're buying those 8 hours for about $2.40 an hour.

If you sell as well as air, those 8 hours are worth a lot more than that on the street. And if prep already takes you fifteen minutes because you've got a system that works, the honest answer is that a subscription buys you very little. Keep the system.

The failure this is really insuring against

Not a boring show. A wrong one.

The thin week is the week something goes on the air that nobody had time to check — an email at 5am, from a company you've never spoken to, carrying a hundred confident sentences and not one link. There's a particular silence about four seconds after a host reads something that turns out not to be true, and in a small market the person who answers for it is you, to somebody who'll see you at the grocery store.

So the thing to insist on, from any service, is that you can check it before you say it. Two independent sources, linked and dated, on the item itself. Everything else about a prep service is convenience; that part is risk.

What to cut when the day falls apart

In order, and this holds whether or not you pay anybody:

1. Cut the second-best story, not the setup. Almost every long break is long in the setup, and cutting content to protect an explanation is the wrong way round.
2. Keep the local item. It's the only thing on your sheet nobody else can run.
3. Keep the phone topic. It fills time you no longer have to prepare for, and it sounds like a show rather than a jukebox.
4. Bank it, don't bin it. The evergreen stuff you didn't use today is tomorrow's insurance.

That's the short version of a routine built to survive a bad week, which is free and doesn't need an account.

What ShowPrepPro does for a one-person show specifically

• The edition is finished before you open it. 21 sections, built overnight, landing at 5pm the day before so you can prep on the couch and not ten minutes before air.
• Everything's timed. Read times on every item and a break builder that counts against your clock, because you haven't got a producer watching it for you.
• You can read it on the air as it sits. Large-type reading copy, held still on the screen, so nobody's retyping anything into a bigger font with the song running out.
• You can hear yourself back. One button records the station off its own stream while you talk and files the clip. In a one-person operation nobody else is listening to your show critically, and this is the cheapest way to get somebody doing it — even if that somebody is you, in the car, the next day.
• Everything you've ever done stays here. Close the day and the whole show files itself — the breaks, the copy as you read it, the airchecks, your notes — and it's still searchable next year. It's your archive, and you can take it with you.
• Local Angle — coming. A section written about your market, still being built. Everything else already hands you copy you can localize in about ten seconds.
• One price. $19 a month, everything included, 14 days free with no card. If you forget to cancel we email you instead of charging you.

It's made by somebody in the same spot you're in — a host who still does mornings and owns the station he does them on.

Questions

Is show prep worth it for a small-market station?

Do it as arithmetic. If prep takes 40 minutes a day and a service takes it down to 15, that's about 8 hours a month back. At $19 a month the question is whether 8 hours of your time is worth $19, and if you're also selling, producing and running the board, it usually is. If prep already takes you 15 minutes, it isn't.

We have no budget. Can one subscription cover the station?

ShowPrepPro is per account, and most small stations only need one, for the shift that does the most talking. A producer joins your account free, up to 3 of them, and works on your show with you. The breaks, notes and archive are per account, so if two hosts each want their own rundown, they each want their own account, and a co-host can copy your station setup in one step.

Most of my shift is segues and liners, not scripted breaks. Is this any use?

That's the normal case, not the exception, and the aircheck button was built for it: it records whatever you're saying, whether or not the copy came from here. A clip of an adlibbed segue is probably the most useful one you can keep, because there's no script to compare it against — the only way to know how it went is to hear it.

Will it make us sound like every other station?

Only if you read it flat. The material is national by nature, so localizing it matters more than the material does. Everything here is handed to you in a form you can drop your own market into in about ten seconds, and a Local Angle section that writes your market up for you is being built — it says "coming" wherever it appears, and it will until it runs.

Do I need other software to use it?

No. It runs in a browser on the studio computer or a tablet. A send-to-Cartwright export is coming for stations that use it, and everything works exactly the same if you've never heard of it.

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