A week without the AP ...

Hell, I've written games off TV and radio broadcasts before. Nothing illegal about it.

 

It's not fair-use but public domain. There was a federal case a few years ago where MLB sued fantasy baseball companies because they wouldn't pay for the rights to use player names and stats. The courts ruled that stats and other info is in the public domain.

Getting the info isn't the problem. It's getting it nicely packaged.

 

Public domain. Good, I knew I wasn't getting quite to the root of the thing. I probably nodded off that day in class.

 

Five down, two to go.

I have enjoyed getting to look at stuff from Reuters, as we got a free trial this week. Their service is waaay too expensive for us to use routinely, though.

 

What did you end up doing for your baseball and other agate material?

 

Found objects. And we have been working a little this week with a service called SportsDirect.

For MLB, we were not able to get where we needed to be for box scores – getting those in a form you can use in newspapers anywhere other than AP seems to be real complicated, perhaps by design – so we're running the old-school linescores.

 

Ah, I see. I talked with my mom the other day (I'm originally from around the Tupelo area) and asked her if she noticed a lack of AP in the paper. And, of course, she didn't until I mentioned it. So this whole week without the AP thing must not be noticeable for the average reader.

 

An interesting point. There was internal debate about how "transparent" we wanted to be about what we were doing. The decision, made above my head, was that we would do this without much comment in the newspaper itself and then the editor may write a column later.

It's been partly frustrating and also pretty interesting. But it's way too much additional work to do with existing staff on a routine basis.

 

... And the week "without AP" is over. Whew.

 

Two Monday morning calls about not having MLB box scores. Same guy, called twice.

 

I'm sure he was trying to get the stats for his fantasy baseball team.