SETUP - PLANNING YOUR STATION

Arranging Programming Elements

Ok, so you've made a list of the programming elements you want to include. Now you must determine what order to present them in.

For thought-starters, consider listening to several stations which do formats similar to what you have in mind. Listen starting at the top of the hour, and take notes. Write down each thing that happens, and note the time each event starts and how long it lasts. Your notes might be taken like this...

Time Event Length 09:00:00 Network News 5:00 09:05:00 Local Weather :30 09:05:30 Jingle :05 09:05:35 Song 3:43

Continue charting until you've done a full hour, which will give you an excellent idea what they're really doing. Immediately, you'll begin formulating your own ideas about how you might do it, similarly and differently. This is an excellent learning experience. Later, you can use the same sort of chart to design your own radio station's format clocks.

There are some basic radio principles to consider when building your format which are the sort of "tried and true" basics. You may or may not want to adhere to them, but we'll present them here for your reference:

•   Give your station a definite set of call letters or a distinct name, and use it constantly "on the air" to reinforce who you are.
  
  
  
•   Have a slogan which communicates what kind of station you have and the image you want to convey
  
  
  
•   If you are music-intense, go for music sweeps of at least three songs in a row, interrupted only by quick sweepers and jingles
  
  
  
•   Do not go directly from music into commercials/promos without a station image line or bumper of some kind
  
  
  
•   Do not go from commercials/promos directly into music without a station image line, jingle or bumper of some kind
  
  
  
•   Avoid running your announcement breaks on the quarter-hours (a rule we violate mercilessly on BeOSRADIO), but instead, run them at :10, :20, :40, and :50

Create a list of a full composite hour of programming. To help envision the proportions of the hour taken up by the various elements you are including in your format clock, try drawing it as a pie chart, with each slice representing a portion of an hour.


PRINTABLE CLOCK FACES

We have provided you with a printable format clock face in PDF format in two styles, with radial spokes and spokeless (we like using the spokeless one and drawing in our own lines with a ruler). By printing out the blank forms we've provided, you can have a great worksheet. Pencil-in your own pie-slice style format clock layouts, and even color code the pie slices with highlighers or markers to make them easier to view. Here's an example of a filled-in format clock page, just pencilled-in, for your reference.


If you are viewing the PDF documents in BeOS, help yourself to this free PDF Viewer, which displays them beautifully. Otherwise you can also view and print them using your PDF reader under Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. if that is where you are doing some of your format planning.


Here are examples of format clock charts, mostly from network broadcasters.

•   Example 1
  
  
•   Example 2
  
  
•   Example 3
  
  
•   Example 4 (pdf document)

Once you have your format clock planned out, it's time to create the real thing for use in TuneTracker™!




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