Life with AP Limited

Been in the same boat the last couple of days with the storms rolling through, and during a rivalry week to boot.

If you have a secondary wire, time to tap it. Yeah, I hate using it to build roundups since they're hometown (not to be confused with homer) stories, and we don't get total coverage like we would with AP, but they can be made to work. And some of the draft stories were much better than I would have gotten from AP.

Our prep writer also cranked out a 25-inch story analyzing the local baseball/softball seasons to date, which gave us some local. If it's still too wet for the locals to play, think we'll be ok with draft, Lakers and Sharks all going.

 

Hope you don't have to deal with what we did in my stop in Florida.

We had the AP limited service and at the time, tons of space to fill. Sometimes, our section would have six or seven pages! Since we were a Media General newspaper, we could use stuff off the MG wire to fill our inside pages. Since we couldn't use Tampa stuff, we would use a lot of the Virginia Tech copy from up that way and Mike Mulhern NASCAR copy. We got most of our photos from there too. Since we had an ALMS racetrack in town, we used a lot of their press releases, cleaned up of course.

People would always wonder why we had all kinds of stuff from Virginia Tech. Got asked that a lot!

To compensate, we covered the heck out of preps and wrote a lot of 30-35 inch stories. We also did a lot of photo pages.

In the summer, when that largely dried up except for NASCAR, we were nothing but Dixie ball gamers and senior citizens softball and amateur golf. Such fun stuff.

Now they're down to two people, the section is down to a more manageable two pages and I'm sure that went by the wayside. But if you are in a chain, see if you can get some copy off your company's newswire. It saved our bacon more than once.