Hey, AP

We've been in a battle with AP for two weeks now about these damn baseball boxscores. Our macros from last season are simply not running right on them, and AP has been insisting that they haven't changed anything when it's quite apparent that they have.

Now, we've figured out that boxes coming directly from New York are being done slightly differently than other boxscores. Which, of course, is patently ridiculous.

Our tech guys have the raw copy of both. Now, it remains to be seen if AP editors will continue to refuse that they're doing anything differently.

Getty For The Win?

Hah.

Gannett For The Block.

 

I think you're right about the F'ed-up box scores.

For us, the two Chicago box scores (which are the ones we really need each night) are only coming with semicolons in them, instead of tabs. All the other ones are coming in correctly.

I've found it easiest to grab the expanded boxes for the Cubs and White Sox and just delete the extra columns (batting average, hitters' strikeouts and walks, pitchers' ERAs).

Still, a pain in the ass on deadline.

 

The tough thing with getting this right is the "language barrier."

The boxes come in looking 15 ways for 15 newspapers.

Our boxes need to have "format-merge" (FM) coding in them, which in turn are changed into word-spaces or <tl> (tab-left) or <tr> (tab-right) in our search/replace process.

Ninety percent of the editors out there, and understandably AP too, have no idea what I'm talking about with format-merges, because it's unique, I think, to our Harris system.

On an earlier system, these came in as call-signs (@). On a system before that, I'm pretty sure they arrived as the semicolons you're referring to.