AP Exchange Community Blog

Year End Content Made Easy

If you'd like a quick way to find all year end content, run the following search in AP Exchange:  slug="ye"

Be sure to use the quotes!

New Concept Searching Guide

Our Concept Searches are certainly popular! Here's the user guide to help you understand this type of searching. It is a huge time-saver and great for building special sections in the paper or creating special sections online. Download concept_searching.pdf

Sharing Searches in Your Newsroom

We've added a new feature that allows you to share saved searches with colleagues in the newsroom. It may be that someone is very good at creating a saved search and that person can help others. It may be that one person creates a critical search and shares with colleagues in a department. Any number of workflow issues could call for this. It's a simple process that is outlined in the Saved Search cheat sheet which you can grab right here. Download saved_search.pdf

Preventing Duplication in the Paper or Site

  We've added a feature in Exchange that allows editors to see if anyone else in the organization has already downloaded a story, photo or graphic. In the center column, click on the small icon. It will do a scan of the database and tell you who else downloaded the item and when.

Scanning for Graphics

Need a good way to scan for graphics in AP Exchange? Try this search.

1. At the very top of the site press in the Graphics button.

2. Type this into the search field in the upper left corner: category=(a or e or s or i or f)

3. Run the search and then save it. This search will give you all graphics but will leave out weather.

4. You can also click the ALL link in the various Essential AP categories to see just Sports graphics or just Entertainment graphics and so on.

Using AP Exchange to find Local News

Here are some ideas for saved searches in AP Exchange to surface local news from the AP wire. Scanning slugs and headlines is a time consuming, inefficient way to look for local content. We have seen editors around the country find locally relevant news using the following searches. So, try these:

Set up saved searches for:

1. All towns in your publishing area

2. All local newsmakers

3. All local employers

4. All local topics, and try using our new Concept searches. More info on this here.

Once you save the search, check in frequently or as a backup email the saved searches to yourself so you don't miss any of the content.

For help saving a search, here's our 1-page cheat sheet.Download saved_search.pdf

Search for News by Concept

I'd like to draw to your attention a powerful new feature we've enabled in AP Exchange to help editors find more relevant news faster. We can now craft searches using concepts and not just keywords.

Searching by concept is a very easy way to zero-in on locally relevant content faster. Here's how to find news in AP Exchange using this approach.

All of the concepts that are now live are listed below. To search any of them, preface the search with subjectname= and then add the concept. For example, to find all the news about women's health, type subjectname="women's health". Note, if the concept contains two or more words, please use quotes.

Economy
Architecture
Art
Award shows
Books
Celebrity
Dance
Fairs and festivals
Fashion shows
Games
Media
Movies
Music
Nightlife
Performing arts
Theater
Accidents
Disaster response
Explosions
Natural disasters
Crime
Oddities
Transportation
War and unrest
Alternative medicine
Children's health
Dentistry
Diseases and conditions
Drugs
Fitness and exercise
Health care costs
Medical ethics
Medical research
Men's health
Nutrition
Public health
Seniors' health
Women's health
Education
Religion
Social issues
Automobile racing
Baseball
Basketball
Boxing
Cricket
Cycling
Football
Golf
Hockey
Horse racing
Soccer
Tennis
Track and field
College sports
Doping
High school sports
Women's sports
Consumer electronics
Aerospace technologies
Agricultural technologies
Automotive technologies
Biotechnology
Construction technologies
Educational technologies
Entertainment technologies
Food preparation technologies
Green technologies
Materials technologies
Medical technologies
Transportation technologies
Information technologies
Internet technologies
Wireless technology
Technology issues

Help for Searches Using Special Characters

We have a special character issue to sort out, but in the interim if you are searching for terms with the ampersand or apostrophes, drop the full term in between quotation marks. For example,   "Mother's Day"  or "Texas A&M". We want to eventually avoid putting these searches between quote marks and will introduce this in an upcoming release.

Great Example of Finding Local Content with AP Exchange

I wanted to share example of how AP Exchange can help you discover great local content on the AP wire.

I did a search for a local community, Glen Ridge, NJ. The following story about the Boston half marathon appears. Under normal circumstances, papers covering northern NJ would probably never look at the story. Why? Well, for starters the dateline is Boston, third the headline is about a Kenyan and fourth the slug is 'Half Marathon'.

But, waaaaay down at the bottom is the reference to not only the Glen Ridge marathoner, but another from the community of Pt Pleasant, NJ. It's literally buried the second to last 'graph.

Now, no one wants to run searches every day for all the towns in your publishing area. That's what saved searches do. Set it up once and see what comes back. A local community saved search is a wire well worth setting up and checking daily.

-------------

Kenyan sets record in Boston half marathon

BOSTON (AP) _ Tom Nyariki of Kenya won his first Boston half marathon and set a course record, edging Samuel Ndereba on Sunday.

Nyariki burst ahead of his fellow Kenyan down the final stretch. Ndereba, the 2006 winner, had hoped to set on an elusive course record in this year's Boston Athletic Association half marathon.

Instead it was Nyariki who set a new record 1:02:19. Ndereba finished less than a second later. Both bested Luke Metto's 2004 record of 1:02:57. Surprise third-place finisher Martin Fagan of Ireland, a 2006 graduate of nearby Providence College, finished with a time of 1:03:04.

Edna Kiplagat of Kenya held off Caroline Chepkorir in the women's race, winning with a time of 1:13:35. Kathy Newberry of Williamsburg, Va. finished third at 1:16:43.

With a laugh, Ndereba thanked race organizers for inviting Nyariki, who, at 36, boasts a lengthy resume on long-distance tracks. Not until 2005 did Nyariki begin running marathons; Sunday's event was his second official attempt at a half marathon.

"I love the guy, and I know the guy is very tough," Ndereba said, "because he's a very good guy in track."

Nyariki credited that experience for his burst down the final stretch.

"Track, I think, helped me," Nyariki said. "Because with (closing) speed, you must have that track capability. In order to win, anyway."

In his first attempt at an official half marathon, Fagan, 24, led the pack for much of the first seven miles. But Nyariki surged into the lead with a blistering eighth mile of 4:26.

"That's what pretty much hurt everybody," Fagan said. "Because we were coming downhill that stage and he caught everyone off-guard, including myself. So I tried to hang on. And it just opened that gap."

The rest of the race effectively became a two-man contest between Nyariki and Ndereba.

In the women's race, Kiplagat, 28, pushed ahead after a trying first-half battle against the field.

"I felt confident after the seventh mile," Kiplagat said. "After the rolling hills, there was flats all the way."

Throughout the dark and gusty morning in Boston's Back Bay, competitors fought wind elements and light rain.

But the wind "wasn't enough to really make me think about it," said Newberry, the first American woman to finish.

Nate Jenkins of Lowell, Mass. was the first American man to finish, at 1:06:16.25.

Tony Nogueira of Glen Ridge, N.J. won the men's wheelchair race with a time of 54:19, holding off 2006 winner Mark Ledo. Jacqui Kapinowski of Pt. Pleasant, N.J., won the women's wheelchair at 1:22:17.

A total of $30,000 in prize money was awarded, with winners taking home $5,000. A record 4,917 participants entered the race, which follows Boston's Emerald Necklace.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press

Latest Help Guides for AP Exchange

Download saved_search.pdf Download essential_ap.pdf A few newcomers to AP Exchange have said, "If the system is so easy, why do you need guides?" Well, most folks can get up and running without the guides, but there are folks who prefer to have some resources to follow when dealing with new software and learning how to become really skilled at setting up powerful searches. Besides, imagine if we didn't produce training material!

So, here are the latest batch. We have Cheat Sheet to help build powerful searches. We have a quick start guide to help with customizing AP Exchange. There's a doc on searching, saving a search and one explaining the Essential AP section of AP Exchange.

My favorite - the Cheat Sheet, hands down. It gives you the info you need to build very niche searches that help find content you may not be aware of and can also save you tons of time.Download quick_start.pdf Download ap_exchange_cheatsheet.pdf Download Search.pdf