A week without the AP ...

"Hi, this is Joe Girardi calling in my game tonight."

"Hi, Joe, so who won?"

"Um, I think we won, either 12-1, or 13-1. Let me recheck the scorebook here ..."

Reporter waits several minutes.

"OK, we won 13-1. Derek Jeter went 4-for-5.

"Jeter? How do you spell that name?"

"J E T E R. And Alex Rodriguez went 3 for 3 with three homers. But if it's possible, can you get in Colin Curtis' name in? He came in the ninth inning and played good defense."

 

And, honestly, we might end up there someday. But not now, for a variety of reasons.

 

If the assistant coach forgets, think of all the angry calls you're going to get from Jeter's and A-Rod's moms.

 

Curious to hear how it goes, Henry. Hopefully well.

As someone at a 25K daily who deals mostly with news pages these days, I agree that this move will be tougher on the news desk, especially regarding photos.

We have tight papers when we don't think twice about limiting AP to nation, world and state roundups, but sure enough, a few people will call and complain that we "intentionally" left out coverage of, say, a terrorism trial or something. In our area, anyway, more people are looking for big world/nation stories than you'd think.

 

That's gold, man.

 

"Uh, I don't have first names on their guys."

 

Except the coach spelled his player's name correctly.

 

During the spring there are some days on end where we could fill four pages of local and never touch the wire. Of course, our readers want their MLB boxes and local pro gamers and would throw a hissy fit.

 

OK, one day down and six to go.

Learned a lot this afternoon and I don't feel like we missed too much stuff that AP had in its report.

NCAA basketball tourney? MCT with a dash of rewrite.
All-Star Game? L.A. Times via MCT.
British Open? Orlando via MCT.
Tour de France L.A. Times via MCT.
World Cup follo? Miami via MCT.
Favre's Hattiesburg workout? Woulda been nice, especially the AP fotos.

Our wire art mostly came from Reuters.

No surprise, agate was a lot of additional work. And wrestling with baseball boxes later in the week will be a bitch.

And whereas there are sometimes as many as 3 of us in here on Saturday, I might be in here by myself. Ouch.

 

Not to burst your balloon, but all of those stories happened early in the news cycle. Three of 'em were in Europe. What happens on deadline will be key, I think. AP is usually (ducking to avoid objects being thrown) faster on deadline.

 

No question, you are correct.

I can already see that the only real way to cover ourselves on the All-Star Game is to essentially write our own running lede. Delightful!

But useful. It's useful to be able to develop some time-and-motion metrics for all this stuff we take for granted thanks to AP.