AP Exchange

My shop has been getting its AP stories through a satellite connection for years now, but in the next couple months AP is going to shut down its satellite operation entirely and the only way you'll be able to get AP stories is through AP Exchange. The only problem is, I hate AP Exchange. More than anything, my biggest problem is that if you copy a story off the web site and put it on your page, the damn thing inserts blank lines in between every paragraph and turns all em-dashes into underscores. When I explain this to the AP, they seem confused. Is there some setting you can change or some way to fix this? Am I the only one who hates AP Exchange?

 

As someone who used to string a little for AP, I can tell you the writers have to use underscores to make the dashes. So that's probably not fixable. All I know. Can't help with the rest. Sorry.

 

It's absolutely ridiculous in 2010 that the AP can't provide usable copy on a website. How the hell hard can it be? There's no reason to be using 1993 vintage coding techniques in 2010.

 

When you call up a story, scroll to the bottom of the story. There is a little box in the left-hand corner. Click that and you can get the HTML coding for the story (you have to meander through a lot of other crap coding, but eventually you'll see the story with P marks and such).

 

Agate is a mess on AP Exchange. The few times I've tried to pull stuff off of there it's made me want to bash a squirrel with a hammer.

 

This. It's bad enough the regular way, especially hockey standings with all those columns. But do they not use tabs at all when they put them on Exchange? I don't have time with an 11 p.m. deadline to reset all the tabs.

 

We use Firefox and the tabs are there for us. But my Firefox developed a bug and now it locks my system when it launches, so I have to get my AP Exchange stuff through Safari. No tabs there. So I have to move to another machine to get my agate. Kind of sucks.

I feel your pain on the 11 p.m. deadline, apeman.

 

Once again, AP responding to the needs and wants of its customer base, by dumping the satellite feed, which (for us) works outstandingly. AP gets shittier and shitier by the second, and does not even seem to care.

 

Check with your editors to check with your IT people, but many shops have converted or are converting the AP Exchange feed into the front-end system, ideally bringing little disruption to the workflow (crossing fingers and hoping for agate tabs to work).
We're in that process.
I thought I heard fall for the switch from satellite but I can check with AP.

 

Copy and paste the stories from the web to the notepad on your destop. Then, do a line item replace of _ with -- if you want. That usually does the trick and you don't get the HTML code.

We use AP Exchange for photos, but we have a server and custom built database that brings the copy into our system. I can't imagine we are unique. When wire server goes down, then we use the AP Exchange.