Does AP have to be better?

This is what is difficult to get across to too many sources that are screaming "local-local."

Sure, they want their high school sports and the occasional local enterprise piece or feature. They also want the nearby colleges, the state and regional news and the national and international breakdown, too. But the Monday following the Super Bowl, daily papers shouldn't be trying to centerpiece some local feature that could easily run another day strictly to fulfill some obstinate local quota. Nor should papers in the States be trying too hard to find some obscure story from Southeast Asia to splash across the front the night after a major night of high school sports in their subscription area.

They might be able to get the high school breakdown from a non-daily, and the AP rundown from McPaper. But the job of the daily sports section is to skillfully blend the elements, and cutting out AP strictly to look more local and busy is absurd.

 

They've always set a deadline and up to a couple of years ago, they were doing their advance work in advance. My sources in Kentucky tell me that they've just been a shining example of pathetitude this year. Their statewide preps work really started slipping a couple of years ago; there was a change on the sports desk in Louisville and the guy they brought in made it clear he wanted as little as possible to do with high school sports. Four or five years ago, the effort out of the Louisville bureau was standout; now, it's more like get-out. I'm trying very hard not to name names here, but it's very tempting.

We had a discussion of this in late December or early January over on Sports & News; essentially, the problem isn't with the voters but in fact with the people responsible for arranging and counting the votes.

 

How do they handle it in your state? In my state, there has been a general downturn in the amount of preps done by their staffers, but one of the sports guys told me it was from on high (being told by the higher ups to farm out as much preps as possible) and wasn't a decision he made or agreed with.

 

The state sports writers' association handles it down here. Timewise, it comes out fairly late compared to when Kentucky's used to (it once was the week of the state finals). But since I'm not covering sports any longer, it's not my problem.

 

Forgive me, but I was spoiled working around two great AP professionals in Southern California, Ken Peters and John Nadel.
No one is any better.

 

Here, here. I slept better the night, I think it was John but may have been Peter, called me in NYC to let me know he liked a change I made in his PM lede. I was only 24 or 25, and rarely, and I mean rarely, ever touched their work. Pros, both of them. Nobody dictated a better boxing lede from ringside than Ed Schuyler, either.

 

We used to have a national desk of 4 editors. They put together a daily budget of 15-20 or so stories a day, about half or more would be wire stories.

Then we just eliminated the national desk. Two editors were hired to handle politics and all other stories came under the discretion of a more powerful city desk. Frankly, the change has been fantastic. If we move 400 inches (rough estimate) of copy per night, no more than 40 of it is national/international, and of that, only 25-30 will be wire.

Maybe once a week we'll run a wire story that's longer than 5 inches.

We have a bureau in D.C. to go with our political writers, a full-timer in California and regular freelancers in England, France and the Middle East. But a real national story really breaks into the front of the paper and there's really no place at all for an AP story of any length.

Now if something really big happens, we're still going to kick your paper's ass on it. We cranked out 25 stories in two days on Benazir Bhutto's assassination. We had four pages on Castro stepping down, including a first-person story about meeting him. But on a regular basis, we go 90-95 percent local and staff written.

 

No, it's the AP which drags its feet on even getting the nomination email out in time. They give us a set date to respond, then they wait forever to release the teams.

And our all-area teams work fine. If the coaches don't respond in time, their kids don't make the team. Works like a charm.

And for the girls' state tournament, looks like they looked at the boxscore to do a gamer rewrite. Pretty pathetic. At least the pictures are good, they're from the local daily photog

 

So...you have a bureau, a full-timer in California and regular freelancers and between them they produce 25 inches of copy a day? And I'm sure that's cheaper than AP...

And by the way, most of us don't have those kind of resources.

 

and you do an awesome job of cranking out the agate. good work.

 

There's also the fallacy of believing that having your own writers providing the copy is ALWAYS better than AP providing the copy. And it's just not that simple. That's giving your writers too much credit.

 

So, just out of curiosity, did you have a staffer in Dayton tonight? Got staffers lined up for Little Rock, Anaheim, Washington, D.C., and Omaha?