Newspaper Terms

A writethru is the subsequent version of the same story that has more facts, details, quotes or the like.

Leading and kearning are typographical terms. Leading is the space above or below a line of text, determining how close they are from each other. Kearning is the space between characters in a line, determining how squished or spaced-out they appear.

A pica is a unit of measurement. Pica poles are just pica rulers.
12 points = 1 pica (yes, like point size for a font)
6 picas = 1 inch
so 72 points = 1 inch

 

Newspaper graphics, prior to the PC age. Look at the chatter below Brick Muller's name.

 

Sweet hip pads.

 

bullet re-plate

 

Surprised nobody mentioned the old X-Acto blade -- that little tool for cutting copy. Also effective for scaring the crap out of sports desk people if the compositor has good accuracy.



Portabubble ... portable terminal of the '80s. We really considered it state of the art. Because most of it was lightweight plastic, it only weighed about 16 pounds. I once held one with one arm in a phone booth in a driving snowstorm to file a HS football story, holding the phone in the coupler with the other hand. And we LIKED it that way. Harrumph.

Teleram ... before the Portabubble. It was pretty heavy. Damn heavy.

Thank god for PCs and e-mail.

 

Dooley nailed it with buyout and layoff.

folio
boom run
ear
bug
Compugraphic typesetter

 

I was stupidly cleaning my fingernails once with an X-Acto knife while seated, dropped it and scrunched my legs together to "catch" it.

I did. The blade sank into my thigh all the way to the hilt.

No pain. Minimal blood. A trip to the ER for a teatnus shot was good enough.

And this gem, from William Strunk Jr.:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

 

This is one phrase I don't understand, even though I've seen it over and over again here on SportsJournalists.com. I mean, I probably know one when I see one, but I don't know how it's defined.

 

Shouldn't Death have been the one to say this?

 

Think centerpiece.

 

I defined it a page earlier.