When’s the last time you tried to monitor every local talk show you air to make sure your station is on target? Unless you lock yourself in a hotel room and do a 24 hour monitor, it’s almost impossible. And that’s only going to give you a one day sample.

Here’s a time saver tip that will give you at a quick snap shot everyday of what’s being aired on each of your local talk shows. It will not tell you how the shows actually sound but this tool will give you a sense of the content and flow of your station’s programming.

Below is my “Week-At-A-Glance” show tracker that I’ve used for years. It only takes a moment each hour for the producer to complete and each day after the show, it’s emailed to the program director.

It’s easy to put together. Just create it in an Excel spreadsheet with the following columns.

Check out the tracker below starting at the first column on the left.

· Column #1 Day / Hours

First column shows the day broken into hours, and each hour divided into quarter hours.

That way, if the topic or guest changes in the course of the hour, you can see the flow of the content.

· Column #2 News Hooks

What topics were being churned? What was the hook being used to generate calls? What was the purpose of the guest appearance and how did it relate to today’s hottest news talk topics? Just a few short words are used to describe the content.

· Column #3 Guest(s)

Name of guest aired — this may be a newsmaker on the phone, a guest in studio, anyone not a member of the show.

· Column #4 Audio Clips Available

This shows the number of audio clips that were made available to the host that related specifically to what was being discussed in that hour.

· Column #5 Audio Clips Aired

How many were actually used.

· Column #6 Calls Screened

Number of calls available that hour for airing

· Column #7 Calls Aired

Number of calls that made it to the air that hour

Show-At-A-Glance

When you open the email each day, at a glance, you get a feel for the show. It’s a quick way to go back and listen to a specific segment, identify a hot moment you want pulled for a promo, etc.

And over the course of a week, you begin to see if the show is on target.

Horizontal Programming

This is also an easy way to track the flow of the show day-to-day. For example, what’s generally happening in the first hour of the show each day? If a person could only tune-in the first hour of the show Monday-Friday, what will that listener typically hear vs. if they tune in only the third hour? Do you see any interesting patterns?

Vertical Programming

Look at the flow of the show on any given day hour-by-hour. What’s happening in the second hour that will pull listeners across from the first hour?

Bottom Line

The Show Tracker does not replace the monitoring sessions where you actually hear what your listeners hear. However, I’ve found that this is a quick simple way for not only program directors, but producers and hosts to get a quick snapshot of what is happening on their show over the course of a week.

And it’s another time saver programming tool that helps you work smarter, not harder.

PS. Check out the online Talk Radio programming sessions at PackerSmartTalk.com