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AP agate desk killed me the last two nights

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by EStreetJoe, Mar 10, 2012.

  1. EStreetJoe

    EStreetJoe Well-Known Member

    Tight space for the agate page.
    Don't have room to run the full men's tournament glance, so planned to grab the list of current day's tournament scores (5th writethru in the scores feed) and run that.
    The last two nights several versions moved close to deadline -- some had scores from the prior two days and none from the current day. Others had some of the current day's scores, were missing some of the current day's scores and had previous days' scores, and NONE had all of the current day's scores and just the current day's scores.
    It's unbelievable how many f-bombs I was dropping when I saw this.

    I wound up having to go through the tournament glance and manually remove the current day's scores and formatting them - waste of 5-10 minutes on deadline instead of just being able to grab a list and throw it on the page.

    Anyone else have this problem?
     
  2. Traveling

    Traveling Member

    The AP Tournament Glance has been a Charlie Foxtrot ever since Thursday. Women's side, too.

    But since Glantz-Culver sends us lines on all possible games the following day, and I have to watch the scoreboard to make sure I'm getting rid of lines for Cincinnati-Notre Dame, it's made spotting the AP screwups much easier.
     
  3. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    Yeah, we noticed it last night. Pretty sad.
     
  4. HejiraHenry

    HejiraHenry Well-Known Member

    Yes, that 5th take has been screwed up all week.
     
  5. EStreetJoe

    EStreetJoe Well-Known Member

    I didn't notice it earlier in the week as it was early in tournament season and was off Thursday, but definitely noticed it Friday and last night. Friday I blew deadline by 5-10 minutes because of it, last night I was more prepared for it.
     
  6. Matt1735

    Matt1735 Well-Known Member

    When I was in charge of the agate page, I went through and formatted it once and kept a master copy. Then as games ended, I updated manually. That ensured the tournaments that I wanted at the top (local interest) were there, all of the date references were correct (yesterday, today, tomorrow) and all of the time references were as well (change for central time).

    I'd do this for the NCAA tournament and college bowls glance too.
     
  7. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    OK, here's the dirt on this, because when it started happening again tonight -- and when I saw we had about 70 scoreboard files in our agate wire search between 11 and 11:10 p.m. -- I called New York.

    The AP guy said that they aren't sending them. He said that it has to do with the search parameters that have been set up by our individual newspapers. And apparently, our search parameters are calling in every scoreboard file sent in the last three days, even if it's three days old.

    It's a change in how we receive things. We used to receive directly from New York; now, things get dumped into AP Exchange, and our computer systems search for what they want out of there.

    I threw it in the lap of our IT guy ... waiting to see if anything happens.
     
  8. HanSenSE

    HanSenSE Well-Known Member

    That could be it. A few years ago when we switched back to full wire from Limited, we'd run into jams every night, since the system was getting more than it could handle. Our techine handed me a list of what we were getting and we cut out things we didn't need (like full horse racing charts). Problem solved.
     
  9. lesboulez

    lesboulez Member

    is anyone else missing lines from the agate? ours is chopping off pieces from the top...
     
  10. OTD

    OTD Well-Known Member

    Yeah, ours too. AP initially said it was our equipment (which is what they always say) but they've finally owned up to the problem. They say they've got developers on it, but it probably WON'T be fixed tonight. Bastards.
     
  11. apeman33

    apeman33 Well-Known Member

    That's what I've done, too. I formatted the entire tournament schedule this afternoon and I have it on a separate template. Then each night, I'm just grabbing the parts I need and updating manually. It's better than having to reformat the entire list (as much as our primitive system will do).

    I got a women's glance with lines missing from the top today and had to go find an older version to get the missing parts.
     
  12. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    The standings aren't adding value to your brand anyway. You should dump them and run a expose on Senator Blabbermouth. [/crossthread]
     
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