Late last summer, someone in the Associated Press Kansas City bureau called and said it was the Journal-World’s turn to provide a voter for the weekly AP football poll.

Annually, one member of a 65-person AP football poll board hails from Kansas — usually from newspapers in Topeka, Wichita, Lawrence, Hutchinson, Manhattan or Salina — and the Kansas City bureau tries to play fair, as it should, by passing the ballot around.

I hadn’t been on the board for several years, so I volunteered, forgetting that being a voter can be a hassle because you have to e-mail or call in your ballot to the New York AP bureau prior to 11 a.m. every Sunday.

But I’m old school, and I grew up believing that voting is the duty of every American, whether it’s a mundane local primary, a momentous presidential election or a meaningless football poll.

That’s what all polls are, you know. Meaningless. Rankings don’t mean anything. Coaches continually stress that fact. They’re right, of course, but nobody listens. You know why, don’t you? People love polls. They absolutely love ’em.

People eat up arbitrary rankings because they’re conversation-makers. People babble about gambling lines for the same reason. Even though the vast majority never bet so much as a nickel on a game, they’re still curious about the latest line. And so newspapers — the Journal-World included — provide both rankings and gambling lines because that’s what their readers want.

The Associated Press is the largest news-gathering agency in the world. In this country, it hasn’t had any real competition since United Press International went belly-up about a quarter-center ago. The AP’s mantra, like all media, is to report the news.

At the same time, however, the AP manufactures news. That’s what a poll is. Manufactured news. Polls are released Mondays or Tuesdays because those are the traditionally slow news days, and the polls fills air space on radio and TV and columns in newspapers.

Basically an AP poll is a bunch of media-types — in this case sports writers and sportscasters — who band together to produce news that isn’t really news in order to sell more newspapers and lure more listeners and viewers. There’s nothing wrong with that in a business sense, but more and more, newspapers, in particular, are beginning to sense they’re sending the wrong message.

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Earlier this week, the Associated Press posted a letter to the BCS forbidding use of its weekly poll in the compilation of the rankings used to determine the mythical national football champion.

The AP’s decision was a knee-jerk reaction to the growing number of newspapers refusing to participate in the balloting — although still publishing the results — because they believe the BCS, by re-manufacturing the manufactured news, had heightened public awareness of the media sticking their noses where they don’t belong.

The BCS acquiesced, saying it would honor the surprise request and no longer feed those rankings into its computer. The AP is fortunate because the BCS could have said, in effect, that the media rankings were published information and therefore available to anyone and everyone and would use them anyway.

On the surface, with many media outlets bailing, the letter the AP sent to the BCS seems like a last-ditch effort to save its long-standing poll.

In my case, I believe if the AP has a poll board and they ask me to vote on it, I should volunteer because the J-W is an AP subscriber and has a duty to cooperate when asked. But I’m beginning to believe more and more the AP poll is a dinosaur.

If the AP drops its rankings, as it probably should (and that includes its basketball poll), the only poll remaining would be the ESPN/USA Today coaches poll. The Journal-World publishes both of those polls every week.

Who needs two? One poll should be sufficient. It should be the coaches’ job to make those rankings, and it should be the media’s job to report them. Period.