[BC] Re: Channel 6 audio

[Mark Humphrey]

Once you've reviewed a stack of diaries, you realize how flawed the
rating system really is!  Yet, this is what makes and breaks a lot of
careers.

Some people appear to fill the booklets in reliably on Thursday and
Friday, then the weekend comes along and disrupts the daily routine.
So Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are either left blank, or written in
the same color of ink with identical entries for each day.  As Rich
mentions, this is obviously done on Wednesday night or the following
Thursday morning and often by the same member of the household.

Then you have the button-pushers who attribute a period of listening
to several stations but don't list the specific times they switched.
Arbitron assumes this listening should be divided equally.

And you see entries for stations that no longer exist.  In 1985, WWSH
(a former Schulke client) still had numbers in the Philadelphia book
even though it had changed calls to WZGO and format to Top 40 at least
a year earlier.  Diary keepers were apparently hearing Jerry Lee's
"Eazy 101" but writing "Wish", so Arbitron gave the credit to a
station on 97.9 in Hazleton, PA which had picked up the old call sign.
  It was close enough to qualify for inclusion as a Total Survey Area
signal, but way too far north of the metro counties to be listenable,
especially with 98.1 WOGL on the first-adjacent channel.

This new Nielsen "sticker diary" should be interesting.  I'm waiting
to see how many stickers accidentally get stuck together or stuck to
the carpet before they make it to the diary.

Mark

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Rich Wood <richwood at pobox.com> wrote:

> Unless something has changed, nothing in the comments section of the diary
> is used in running the numbers. It's amazing how few people understand how
> to fill out a diary and that it should be done throughout the week rather
> than Wednesday night when their survey period ends.
>