From Screening Sheet to Sentiment Product
Anouk Mensah, Kwame Lindqvist, Osei Vandermeer · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.x00hen
A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement reports a 40-month embedded case study of one suburban commercial talk station, tracing the breakfast producer's caller-screening shorthand through four artefact generations: paper screening sheet, call-management dropdown, weekly advertiser deck, and the rate-card line item sold as the Morning Pulse listener-sentiment index. Across 838 breakfast programs and 5,102 aired calls, six rostered regular callers account for 52 per cent of aired talkback minutes, recomputing the published index without first-time callers shifts it by a median of 0.04 points, and the index carried a rate-card price 31 weeks before its first written definition. In the final quarter the station formalised a Caller Stewardship Roster that rests and rotates its six most dependable callers, which the paper reads as the index's direction of fit inverting: the sentiment measured being, in most settings, the management of its own panel.
