Dropping the AP

College paper dropped our AP subscription my last semester for the McClatchy Tribune to save a decent chunk of money. It worked out well for stories, but we struggled a lot when it came to finding photos on regional stuff.

 

That's a nice idea there. My paper pays a guy for his piss-poorly written, bi-weekly column about the college kids. I almost have management convinced to drop him (thank God), so I might be starting up something like that, too.

 

When I was at a Media General property in Florida that was merely a fishwrap inside the Tampa Tribune, we had AP limited and later got ala carte. All this was even more fun considering back in the good old days, our sports section was a beefy six pages. We did a lot of local leaders, things of that sort. But if your basketball coaches are anything like ours are with stats, you might be in trouble.

So I ran a lot of Media General news services stuff. The NASCAR page every Thursday took care of one of those pages. People wondered why we had all sorts of Virginia Tech football art and stories. Well...

 

If you're looking for sports only, you could try the Sports Network as a wire/scoreboard service.