Leaving AP and agate

Like other papers, we're considering jumping off the AP bandwagon, so I have a question for anyone out there who works at a paper or knows about how papers that have left AP have handled things: What are the options out there for getting agate to put in the paper? We're still going to need a fair amount of this stuff, so we're trying to figure out where we'd get it from and how much it will cost. Any help anyone can offer will be greatly appreciated.

 

Collecting and tabulating it yourself. Good luck with that.

 

My days as an agate clerk were a long time ago -- long before the internet. But can you get most of what you need these days from league websites? It would take time, and I'm not sure how quickly these things are updated since I usually check for scores on ESPN.com and not mlb.com or nfl.com, etc.

And thank goodness I no longer have to code dog racing from West Memphis! That alone wiped out many a would-be agate clerk in Little Rock back in the early 90s.

 

You can get much of the pro agate from league Web sites. College agate can come from an individual school's Web site. But if you're doing that stuff in bulk, like all of the major league or NBA boxes you're going to need a lot of time to enter and code that stuff. Can't see how that's a good thing for a paper that needs a lot of agate. You'd be better off to drop it entirely.

 

can you get it from an alternate service like STATS or Sportsticker?

 

if you'll dig around, there are services that will do your agate page for you and ship it to you in a pdf. You don't get to pick and choose, but you don't have to factor in a body to touch it either.

We talked about dumping AP, too. That was my one and only option to the higher ups.

 

I didn't read whatever he was holding, but heard a copy editor today talking about AP slashing prices to retain members.

 

This thread talks about it:

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/68632/


Apparently the AP is lowering yearly costs and making it so you don't have to give a two-year notice to drop them.