Squid's Redoubt: Operation BSU

mood: tired

music: Flower Travellin' Band - Satori - Satori, Part 5 (Squid's Redoubt)

Those in the know with access to this week’s spreadsheet for the show have already discovered that this coming week’s bit is much different. For one, the show is only scheduled for 1.5hr. Unfortunately, I can’t actually site-schedule the show for 1.5 hours, but that’s the targeted running time.

You’ll also notice that the segments have been chopped from four to three, with one of those being the Music segment wherein we play tracks from the invited band and interview the poor guys. The other two segments, Politics and Entertainment, have both been swapped in position and made only 15min long. Nota also that there is no longer a specific anchor or host associated with each segment! This is a huge, monumental change and you should be aware of what it means:

To wit: Anyone can enter an article on the grid in any segment they like. I’ve, in fact, added a local-focused article both in politics and in Entertainment. The original Anchors of these segments will be responsible for making sure that there is sufficient material every week to fill out the block (and probably a little extra), but while the Anchor makes sure their field is full, and that they take the lead article (by selecting it beforehand by bolding or italicising it), the actual presentation will be done round-robin style by all presenters.

Let me say that one more time: During a given segment, articles will be presented in a turn-taking manner by all Anchors. Two Anchors shouldn’t be speaking back-to-back, so if your Anchor Lead time is coming else, let one of the others take the next article to end the previous segment.

The intent of this procedural change is to break up the voices a bit more for more energy and to take the load of the work for each segment off the Anchor. In a given segment, the ability to veto a story outright first passes to it’s Anchor, then to the Producer, which may override that decision in either direction at his whim. The Producer also counts as an Anchor for the purposes of rotating reads.

It is considered appropriate for those with access to the sheet to put in potential questions for the Media segment which might be included in the interview. These questions can only be vetoed by the Producer (since he’s Media Anchor by default).

30min by default is allocated for the Media guest to be interviewed and a couple tracks or extracts played. There’s a 15min pad following this 30 that can be taken from for the Media segment in ideal cases. In other cases, the show will end as soon as the Media segment comes to a close.

The Outro consists of thank yous to guests, prominant chatroom members, and especially callers, and typically finishes with a final Media song and the show tag.

Hopefully, with this new structure and size we can bring things much in to a tighter focus, reduce some of the terrible cross-talk, and allow for some different voices who aren’t Anchors to get their feet wet in reading articles and commenting on the show.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this new structure runs.

As always, the current show recordings can be heard on TalkShoe, talkcast id 33899. Pull some of the older shows and see how much we’ve grown. Hopefully with these changes, we can continue to grow and evolve as the content and conditions do.