Transmedia: The Morning After Radio Show

In the last class, I brought up the Morning After radio show simply to illustrate the potential interest in Sean's sandwich blog (which still doesn't seem to exist).

The Morning After, which airs from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. Monday through Friday, has moved from 920 AM to 590 AM. Details here.

Thinking about the show, however, I realized that this goofy sports radio talk show is an almost perfect example of transmedia storytelling..

First, the show exists as a typical sports talk show. The hosts talk about the previous day's sports-ball contests. Sports writers and announcers have regularly scheduled segments to talk seriously about sports. Callers periodically call in to express their opinions.

With the addition of texting and e-mailing, however, another level gets added to the show. The anonymity of technology allows listeners to text or e-mail in the most outlandish comments identifying themselves with names of their own choice. Frequent texters & e-mailers create their own personas and have become an integral part of the program as their messages are read on the air.

So, we've got the radio show with professional paid hosts providing content working in concert with frequent listeners who interact in real time with the show and also provide content.

Now, the hosts have developed their own on-air personas, complete with a variety of catch-phrases and recurrent bits of schtick, most of which involve frequent texters & e-mailers.

Because the show fostered such a connection with its listeners (who are also content providers), it should come as no surprise that listeners took to social media and created a Facebook fanpage, which boasts nearly 3,800 members.

Topics on the fanpage -- which is a closed group, requiring approval from a moderator to join -- range from the show itself to sports to politics to polls ranking favorite sandwiches. As might be expected, debates often break out in the comments section and rage on until they burn themselves out.

To recap: We've got the show (which exists to comment on the world of sports), we've got listeners of the show who provide content to the show, and we've got fans of the show interacting with one another on the fanpage.

But that's not all, the show also arranges get-togethers where fans can meet the hosts and each other. A recent event was recorded on a Friday evening and broadcast the following Monday. A celebration of the program became an episode of the program.

Sponsors of the show not only hire the hosts to read and record their advertisements, they often specifically craft their ads using catch-phrases from the show (which are largely meaningless to the general public.)

And, finally, the Morning After can be listened to over terresterial radio, via streaming over the from the Inside STL web page, or as downloadable podcasts. Many fans say they "podcast like the dickens" or "pltd."

As a fan of the Morning After, I look forward to letting the hosts and fans know that a class of graduate students at Webster University are studying the show as an example of transmedia storytelling.