Does AP have to be better?

I'll have to go check but when we got rid of AP at the place I used to work, it cost $30,000 per month.

 

I wish you all the best on Nov. 4. I also wish you nothing but good tidings the next time there's a terror attack in New York, or when we declare war on Iran, or when the pro team down the road a ways gets to the World Series.

With that said, I think a little less of AP for this pharmaceuticals-in-water series they've been running.

 

Shit, are you serious that your paper pays the AP $30.000 a month? So you could hire 12 more writers at 30.000 a year or as many as 20 reporters to cover your local market daily for what your paying the AP.

We have a paper in my city that has 89% AP copy and a handful of real stories that are written by the newspaper's own staff. The sad thing is when they use AP copy for news and sports that is happening in the city not on the road.

 

Oh, blow it out your ass sideways. I've always suspected that you are, in fact, a foof. On this thread, you've proven it.

Readers read newspapers for ... well, news. And unless you're working for the NY Times, then your paper can't cover every national and international news story — for instance, Iran-Contra, presidential elections, both World Trade Center bombings, the economy, Watergate, big-time college and professional sports, the Bay of Pigs, entertainment, the war on terror, Darfur, Rwanda (back in the day), the Prague Spring, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, bombing Libya, World War II, and so on — without wire copy to provide that news.

You want to talk about wire copy being filler? Without wire content, you're down to using chamber-of-commerce handouts to fill the pages — and you can bet your sweet bippy that your readers will know that's filler and will not hesitate to call you on it. The local hot-rod club needing entries for its upcoming car show is not newsworthy but that's what you'll be running, and not buried in the calendar briefs.

Enjoy your journey into irrelevancy.

 

i applaud the correct usage of foof

 

He can get his agate here:

http://www.thefoofstore.com/

 

Well there are other wire services, but regardless, relying more and more on wire copy isn't serving your readers better. In an age when people are turning away from newspapers precisely because it doesn't give them enough unique content we should...give them less unique content?

To be frank I'd rather run the local hot-rod club than a wire story anyway, and your readers would rather read it, too.

I don't know if it's a fallacy or not. Has it been tried? We tried it and not a single person thought it could work. But it did. And we did this with a staff of 9 people.

The key word here is "fill." Don't fill the paper, put out news that's worthy of being published. If that means your section is 4 pages instead of 12, then so be it. That's another five jobs saved in newsprint. Stop giving people irrelevant/redundant information they already get elsewhere.

 

Yeah, exactly. Well, we didn't do that but we did hire two more people and added other news services. Other papers, incidentally, pay AP quite a bit more.

 

My current paper is using an alternate agate service. At the other paper where we got rid of AP, I typed in pro/college boxes by hand.

 

Just curious: What sort of paper are you at? The Podunk Press, where you can get by almost solely on high schools and rec sports? Are there any major pro teams or colleges within an hour?
What do you do for the Super Bowl, World Series, NCAA tournament, bowl games, not to mention day-to-day news and roundups along with agate?

 

I'm at a top-10 paper.

The other paper was an alternative daily with a 150,000 circ in a major market.