AP

What is everyone's opinion on AP not doing wire queue's anymore and putting everything on line? Seems to me agate is going to be a nightmare since the tabs don't hold when you download or copy and paste from the Web site.

 

I second that question....

 

We were told today by our ME, that AP will be going totally online within 3-6 months and that an AP representative will be visiting every newspaper in the next two months to go over what papers will need to make this work.

 

Interesting.

I agree, agate tabs will take forever if they go online. That is unless they make a download program that integrates the tabs.

 

I don't buy it.

May be just your paper. But too many papers will cry foul if AP does this, and demand they pay for software upgrades, as they've all spent thousands of dollars on software to properly work with AP wire.

 

Haven't heard a thing, but I damned well will be asking ...

 

No way. It would be an IT nightmare, and newspaper executives would be outraged. And imagine AP's trying to support the jillion proprietary editing and pagination programs and hold their users' hands through a switch this radical.

 

It's also a matter of redundancy. If your wire crashes, you still have the Web site (which is a pain in the ass, but better than nothing). If they go completely online and you have an Internet outage or a hacker attack, you'd be shit out of luck.

 

i haven't heard a word about this, either.

although if it is true, a few folks who do the agate page at my paper will probably quickly forget the old 'don't kill the messenger' adage when the AP rep walked through our door.

 

There's a trick with Simple Text that will fix that shit, but it is gruelling work. If there is a hell, its residents are required to put together agate pages by formatting raw text from YourAP.org.

 

no lee, that's YOUR ap dot org, not mine. they can keep that damned site and continue giving us copy as they do now.