Newspaper Terms

[jimmydangles]

Can we define a few of these, so the noobs can learn a little?

We shorten every word possible -- even in speech. "Sport" becomes "spt" (pronounced "spit"), etc.

 

[fishwrapper]

Which ones?

 

[fishwrapper]

Chapel Meeting ("Don't touch the mu'er fik'n type!")

 

[jimmydangles]

Thanks for tossing the young'uns a bone, FW.

Veelox, for one. And I'm not sure I know exactly what a takeout is, other than it's an assignment I probably want (and the best food I can hope to eat on a journalism salary).

 

[ServeItUp]

Takeout, thumbsucker, long-form = stories that are quite lengthy and informative, delving deep into a topic. Should be developed during the course of covering a beat. Falling by the wayside in the name of style and decreased attention spans.

 

[fishwrapper]

Veelox=Was the result of a processing machine what would would produce a high-gloss, high-quality boardsheet print.
Takeout=Wow. I thought this was a common one. (I'm not passing judgment). It's basically a long feature. A lot of places had a "takeout writer." Originally it was a magazine term. You could pull the pages out, self-contained, or take them out.

 

[jimmydangles]

Had an inkling, just never heard it defined.

Has anyone else ever heard of "Wellingtons?"

 

[shotglass]

I'm glad we have lost the term "dingbat" from our lexicon. Our old hot-type composing room guys just couldn't understand why the smart-ass college kid didn't want to run them all over the place.

 

[Cadet]

writethru

leading, kearning

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

 

[shotglass]

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

 

[fishwrapper]

Sweet hip pads.

 

[trench]

bullet re-plate

 

[shotglass]

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.

 

[Writer33]

Dooley nailed it with buyout and layoff.

folio
boom run
ear
bug
Compugraphic typesetter

 

[SixToe]

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."

 

[forever_town]

takeout

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.

 

[forever_town]

My all-time favorite:

The morgue.

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

 

[Write-brained]

takeout

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.

Think centerpiece.

 

[shotglass]

 

[fishwrapper]

takeout

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.

I defined it a page earlier.