Dear AP ...

This

 

Last night in the Transactions, AP wrote: KANSAS CITY CHIEFS -- Announced Coach Romeo Crennel relieved himself ..... of defensive coordinator duties.

Don't get pissy here, AP.

 

Worked my election shift tonight and, oh boy, did the AP put in a poor performance. First with the slowdown on AP Exchange, where we always get our pictures. You guys mean you didn't foresee the heavy use coming tonight? Geez, we're only having a presidential election.

Then, our A1 designer, kept waiting for the big Obama re-election story and we got a pedestrian story before his speech even started, then a 6-inch follow that we figured would be picked up and updated, then, nothing. I ended up just tacking the 6-inch new lead onto the previous story and that's what we ran with.

We've been getting constantly updated campaign stories running about 40 inches every day leading up to the election, and then when the election happens, the only thing we can get is a cobbled together 25-incher.

I'm telling you, if there was a competing wire service that we could sign up for, I would lobby for it hard.

 

Not only did we have the AP Exchange issues, the wire went down, too.

 

Serious question here ... Is it just me, or is the AP getting much worse and much more careless in its writing, editing, coverage, etc.?

It seems I used to never find mistakes in AP copy back in the '80s and '90s but now they're everywhere. Anybody old enough to agree or disagree?

 

There have always been mistakes in AP copy, and there always will be.

It would be nice if they at least mastered their own stylebook.

 

I agree there have always been mistakes, but it seems to me they are more frequent now. You disagree?

 

Well, of course there are more mistakes now. Everyone is downsized and strapped.

 

Give me an example if not here in a pm.

 

I don't post from work, so I can't put up unedited AP wire copy as an example. It's kind of hard to pull a wire story up without the service at home. It just seems when reading the wire at work, there are a lot of areas in many of the stories. Simple grammar and stuff. More than I remember anyways or maybe I'm just better at catching the errors now than I was then with 20 more years experience.

 

I notice more errors in the roundups/capsules. Those seem to be the worst.

 

This.