Journalism lingo - a guide

Ah, well, I kind of read it the same way in his explanation, but I guess it's a subtle difference.

As for a 1-42-3 head, it led to the greatest deadline headline of my career; I didn't write it, but I was there:

Horse
wins
race

 

All this reminds me of one of my favorite parts of reading the small rural newspaper when I was covering a county -- if the columns were short they had some supply of obscure facts and trivia and they'd toss one in. IIRC the gy who put them together syndicated them and occasionally put out a column of them.

 

It happened a few years before I got there, but at my first shop, there's a legendary story about the time the slot dummied a 1-column hed (or bastardized at slightly over 1 column) on the front of the section for a gamer about a high-stakes horse race at the local track. The winning horse's name? Morganmorganmorgan. The headline?

Morganmor-
ganmorgan
wins Derby

 

We had those historical-tidbits fillers at my first job. Still remember the headline on my favorite.

Pope dies

 

At Miami, there was a bulldog every day for a while, and at the end of the shift the was "The Clipper," the international edition that went to "the Americas." The paper did very little with the NHL in the regular editions at the time (no local team yet), but the usual Clipper editor, the late Walter Krietsch, ensured that complete hockey results were available for readers in Caracas.

Other lingo there: Hencher, short for henchman, meaning part-timer on high schools. Could be used as a verb, as in "he henched for BVS in the '80s, now he's The Washington Post's Tasmania bureau chief."

 

Heck, how many have press rooms?

 

I remember picking up a bulldog edition of some major metro when I was in college. I thought: "Wow, this place really lets its writers go. Look at all those 80-inch takeouts!"

 

In the early 1990s, I spent an evening at the Herald on sort of a "cultural exchange program" from Tampa and saw the hencher process in action under Bill Van Smith. After its roots were explained to me, I realized then that it was a wonderful piece of local newspaper lingo, and I feel that way even more so today ... especially as I see the fun and color being drained from newsrooms bit by bit every day.

Everyone is doing a great job of recalling some of the terms and practices that made me fall in love with the business way back when. Bulldog. Fillers. Railroading. Tombstones. 5-38-1s. Wild art. Budgets. I still use those terms today, sometimes. It's always a delight to run across people who speak my language.

Keep 'em coming.