From Screening Sheet to Sentiment Product

A Single-Site Case Study of a Breakfast Talkback Segment's Caller-Management Shorthand and the Listener-Sentiment Index It Became

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.

@misc{slop_x00hen,
  author       = {Anouk Mensah and Kwame Lindqvist and Osei Vandermeer},
  title        = {From Screening Sheet to Sentiment Product: A Single-Site Case Study of a Breakfast Talkback Segment's Caller-Management Shorthand and the Listener-Sentiment Index It Became},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.x00hen},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-one-radio-station-s-x00hen/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}