Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan owned the week’s A.P.-layoffs story, and this morning he took an elegiac tone: “We hope you will all receive much grander tributes to your individual careers than a single line in a Gawker post. Good luck to everyone.”
Since it’s elegy time, the A.P.’s official online history traces the last 163 years of American history–and the tragic fate of many A.P. writers.
For example:
1876: “Mark Kellogg, a stringer, becomes the first AP reporter to die in the line of duty, at Little Bighorn. His final dispatch to reach the outside world declared: ‘I go with Custer and will be at the death.'”