Gettin' down at AP

AP, that paragon of paragonness has dutifully informed the world it is ready to blog.

The story on Yahoo about its Bad Language blog made me almost spit up my lunch.

Some excerpts:

If you're confused on what a smog — as our granny called it — is or how it fits into The Associated Press' infrastructure, think of it like this: The AP is the all-knowing yet crotchety robe-clad Sanford and we're his wiseass but totally lovable Son, hocking junk you could probably live without.

From inside our cardboard box at the AP World Headquarters, we'll do stuff like fill you in on Bad News, tell you about the latest Bad Habits, ask stupid questions in Bad Interviews, bitch during Bad Reviews, chase celebrities on Bad Trips and present anything and everything we deem Just Plain Bad.

No one is safe from BL. (That's right. We got initials.)

Oohhh, it's got initials.

This from the AP, whose corporate culture makes the New York Times look like a scandal sheet, makes a proctologists convention look like a swinging singles weekend.

I admire what Tom Curley is trying to do at the venerable news organization to bring it into the multimedia times -- and to save it from becoming irrelevant. I admire the people I worked with and still know there. They do a helluva job.

But AP as hip? I have some initials, too: B.S.

And just to show how hip AP is, the Yahoo story does not have a link to this new blog. Yeah, that's hip: let's put out a blog that's not easy to find among the 5 million or so that now exist.

(AP is following its old model, apparently, of making it accessible only through member newspaper sites. Here's today's entry (sub req after you've clicked once) at the Miami Herald about the "Playboy: The Mansion" video game. The writing is pretty much old AP with a (not much) breezier spin. This is the attempt to be "cool" at the bottom: Parents shouldn't be too worried - BL is sure they'll grow tired of the game after a few hours of click, click, click and boobs, boobs, boobs. Besides, "Playboy: The Mansion" will teach them the most important lesson not being taught in schools nowadays: how to network.)

Mike Manuel at Media Guerrilla has it right, though. If AP would put its muscle into things it actually knows, like tech or business, that would be -- wait, I feel some hip coming -- "awesome."