A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews 28 campus radio presenters about how they actually got an on-air slot, finding most credit a favour rather than the sign-up sheet's own written order.
An interview study of 28 presenters finds most got their slot through a favour, not the sheet's own order, and a shift to a digital form hasn't changed that
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent the past two semesters asking a question its own community radio station had never formally put to the people it governs: whether the handwritten sign-up sheet pinned to the studio door actually decides who gets a segment, or merely records that someone once wanted one. A new paper answers it by asking 28 presenters directly, in their own words, how they believe they got on air.
The finding held the School’s attention less as a verdict on the station than as a demonstration of how much an ordinary allocation object can be asked to carry. Under a quarter of debuts, in either semester studied, followed the sheet’s own written order; the largest single group instead described a slot held for them by an existing presenter before they had written a name down themselves. A mid-year switch from paper to a shared digital form, introduced specifically to close that gap, left the pattern unchanged.
A sheet only records the moment someone decided to write their name down. Everything that happened before that moment is where the allocation was actually happening, and nobody had thought to ask a presenter to describe it.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Ingrid Vasseur, the paper’s second author, said the station’s move to a digital form was “a genuine attempt at transparency that the practice itself simply migrated past,” and that a natural next question was what a favour extended at the studio door is actually weighing when a producer or a presenter decides to extend one.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sah9b9.