For the first time in my life, I no longer have a newspaper coming to my front door or into my yard.
Several years ago we canceled home delivery of The Star, but we continued with a daily subscription to The New York Times. With The Star apparently no longer able or willing to hire enough carriers to guarantee consistent delivery, however, we decided last week to cancel.
So now, like most of the rest of the world, our news consumption is online and on TV and radio.
I’m not going to wring my hands over the situation, but with the passing of print, I wanted to tell you about some of the great newspaper terminology that is being consigned, little by little, to history.
Here are some of the terms we in the newspaper business became familiar with and embraced as our own coded, professional language.
Banner — A headline in large letters running across the entire width of the front page.
Beat — A reporter’s particular assignment, such as City Hall, County Courthouse, cops and courts.
Bold Face — Heavy or dark type.
Box — Border around a story. (When I was working at the Kentucky Post in Covington, KY, back in 1968-69, the granddaughter of a woman from whom I rented a room once registered her impression of one of my stories by telling her grandmother, “He had a box!”)
Broadsheet — A large-sized newspaper, as opposed to a Tabloid, which is more magazine size.
Budget — The lineup of news stories scheduled for the next day’s newspaper.
City Desk — The area of the newsroom responsible for covering local news. (Many papers, including The Star, no longer have newsrooms; they operate out of rented office space or, in The Star’s case — for now — a post office box.)
Clips — Articles that have been cut out of the newspaper. (The Star used to have a “library” that featured a comprehensive clip file, by both subject and reporters’ bylines. The clips were meticulously folded and stored in yellow envelopes, which were stored vertically in large, metal file cabinets.)
Compose — To set type or design pages, as in “the composing room.”
Copy — All material for publication, whether written stories or pictures. (Until about the early 1970s, “copy boys” and “copy girls” would run pages of copy from reporters’ typewriters to editors on the City Desk as deadline approached.)
Copy Editor — A person who corrects or edits copy written by a reporter and writes the headlines. (The Star and its morning counterpart, The Kansas City Times, had phenomenal copy desks, which caught scores of would-be errors every week.)
Cutline — The information below a picture or graphic — the caption.
Dummy — A diagram or layout of a newspaper page, showing the placement of stories, headlines, pictures and ads.
Extra — A special edition of the newspaper, printed between regular editions, containing news too important to hold for the next regular edition.
Flag — The newspaper’s name, printed at the top of the front page.
Folio — The number of a newspaper page.
Four-color — When a color photo was needed, a slide was separated into the basic colors of red, yellow, blue and black.
Fourth Estate — A traditional name for the press, referring to a fourth social class, the others being the clergy, nobility and commoners.
Gutter — The margin between facing pages where the fold lies.
Hot Type — Old-style type made from molten lead.
Inverted Pyramid — A method of writing by placing parts of the story in descending order of importance.
Jump — To continue a story from one page to another. (A Double Truck is a story that jumps from the front page and took up two full, facing pages inside.)
Justify — To space out a line of type so that each line fits flush to the margin.
Kill — To strike out copy, remove type not to be printed or “kill” a story altogether. (Another way of saying a story was killed was to say it was Spiked, that is, the copy was impaled on an actual spike on an editor’s desk.)
Lede — Generally, the first sentence of a story. (One reporter would sometimes compliment another by saying, “Great lede.”)
Linotype — An old-style machine used to produce hot type, one line at a time.
Masthead — A box printed in every issue that states the title, owner and top managers on both the news and administrative sides of a paper.
Newsprint — The bare, machine-finished paper on which newspapers are printed. Newsprint comes in huge rolls.
Pagination — The computerized process by which a newspaper is laid out.
Plate — An aluminum sheet that the negative is transferred to so that it can be run on the press. (People who got written up in the paper sometimes would request that the paper provide them with the page plate, for posterity.)
Press Run — Total number of copies printed.
Proof — A page on which newly set copy is reproduced to review for possible errors.
Rewrite — To write a story again to improve it; to rearrange a story that appeared somewhere else; or to write a story from facts phoned in by a reporter. (As in, “Give me rewrite!”)
Scoop — A story obtained before other newspapers or media outlets report it. (Many a reporter, including me, has been dubbed “Scoop” by some non-newspaper types. Another moniker I picked up from one or two people was “Poison Pen.”)
Stringer — A part-time reporter or correspondent. (In my first few years at The Star, I sometimes took “dictation” from a stringer we had in West Plains, MO, at the southernmost part of the state.)
Syndicated Features — Material such as comics, advice columns, etc., supplied nationally to newspapers by news syndicates.
Typo — Short for “typographical error.”
Wire Services — Agencies like the Associated Press or The New York Times News Service that gather and distribute news to subscribing papers for a fee.
**
Most of those terms are passe, having been replaced by terms like bandwidth, memory, hard drive, hardware, browser and bytes. It’s all good — and I have embraced technology to the best of my ability — but for this former ink-stained wretch, the new terminology has no allure.
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JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Let’s say someone dropped a skein of type after it came out of the linotype machine in the composing room. The type would then be pied. And if the unfortunate person who pied the type could not get it back in order, that metal would go into the hellbox to be melted down and used again…My email address is a variation on the scoop term.
Obviously, the lingo goes even deeper…
What about pica pole? Pat Morrison, a LA Times veteran, brought it up recently as a relic of print journalism. More pricing options for the Star would be attractive to me. I live in LA but have interest in KC and MO. But maybe a couple of stories a week.
Good one, Tom. A pica pole measures, I believe, in picas (one-sixth of an inch), points (72 points to an inch) and inches.
Regarding a Star subscription online, you can take advantage of an introductory offer of $7.99 for six months. Then you can let it lapse for a month or two and go back and get it again. I know the cost of living is high in L.A., but I think you can handle the $7.99…I subscribe to my hometown Louisville Courier Journal, and while I don’t read many stories, it’s good to get the general pulse of the place.
Fitz,
You forgot A-matter.
I didn’t include everything or this post would have been 2,000 words long. (A thousand is plenty.)
But, yes, A-matter is a good one, too. That’s boilerplate information — background stuff that preceded today’s developments — reporters often load at the bottom of a story while waiting for the news that will “top” the story.
Fitz, How about PAPERBOY. You had many grade school/high school friends that delivered the news…twice a day!
Indeed, Johnny, most of us in our high-school poker group delivered The Courier Journal at some point. I had a perfectly balanced bike that I could ride up and down hills and through the yards, all the while pulling papers out of the shoulder bag, folding them tightly and tossing them onto the porches.
Thanks again for this consistently entertaining blog. You could do a whole column just on the new terms for journalism jobs that replaced the old ones. Run the column by an audience engagement editor first.
Great list, Jim! Knew them all. Sad to relegate them to File 13 (or the circular file, which sometimes became Jim Fisher’s spitoon!). I was a “stringer” in the Columbia, MO, bureau during college at Mizzou between my internships, before joining The Times full-time in December 1980. Answered to Monroe Dodd in the newsroom.
I would add “morgue” to the list, another name for the library upstairs. Wish I had my envelope of clippings! Assume it was tossed long ago. We’d call them down to read up on past stories, and they were delivered through the system of pneumatic tubes. I remember sending copy typed on IBM Selectrics up through the tubes to be scanned by OCRs (optical character readers). Only then would we (interns, anyway) get to sit at one of the few reporter VDTs (video display terminals) and edit what we’d typed before it went to our editors and then the copy desk. They all had dedicated VDTs.
As a side note, in our newsroom at The Columbia Missourian, I was there the day that “Rossi” from the Lou Grant TV series, actor Robert Walden, came to visit. We showed him the new VDTs recently installed; he was quite interested.
Anyway, love to read your blog and relive the glory days for a bit. Keep writing!
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About those ‘clips’ from the library, if a careless reporter was tardy in returning them to the library, one of the library people, sent by head librarian John Doohan, came on the hunt.
That’s right, Peg…John was a great guy but his forces didn’t tolerate tardiness or sloppiness with those clips.
Nut Graph – If your lede was a short and clever hook and you summed up the essence and importance right behind it, that was the nut graph. Also, when I started as a reporter, I got the moniker “Porter the Reporter.” Didn’t care for it at first, but got used to it. The day I started as a reporter, I brought my Selectric from home, the only other electric typewriter in the building was the publisher’s. Everything else was referred to as a vdt – lower case for “very dirty typewriter.”
Nut graph was a relatively late arrival to the lexicon, Steve. I didn’t hear that term until maybe the early 1990s. It’s a good one, though…Few things are more important in a wide-ranging story than the nut graph. It’s often the difference between keeping or losing the reader.
Wouldn’t it be nut graf? One of those weird spellings, like lede.
I never heard of rewrite men until Gusewelle’s “Heartland Encore” (https://www.pbs.org/video/charles-gusewelle-heartland-encore), which includes a nice tribute to Fred Kiewit: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/173157573/frederick-peter-kiewit
Today’s Star symbolized its likely demise: Our “newspaper” notified us that there had been a football game at Arrowhead (or world be one) but gave no score or coverage. Given that the KC Star’s major audience is for the Sports Page, that is not good news. Moreover, it used to at least cover local government/politics. But the last story on the KC Council was delayed until AFTER the fact, it was not much help.
This is sad — but the fact is that when you have no historical perspective or policy knowledge in reporting and are required to put your issue to bed and print before the Des Moines Register gets its turn on the presses, you cease to actually be a NEWSpaper.
Some of my favorite newspaper lingo is unprintable, such as when a public figure talks to a group of reporters at the same time, or when a overly fawning article is published.
I can’t think of the terms you’re referring to, Alex…If you’d like, send them to me, and I’ll determine if they’re printable.
Don’t forget the handy Proportion Wheel that those of who laid out pages (Layout is another term) in the 1970s and early ’80s used to size photos. I still have a wheel along with the trusty Pica Pole, which also served as a straight edge to clip copy.
And, how about Glue Pots? We used brown glue on a brush to attach pages of wire copy before sending them down the tubes to the linotype operators. Every now and then while on a hurry on deadline, I’d stick that brush into my coffee cup instead of the glue pot.
Sigh.
“…dancing in the dark, walking through the park and reminiscing.”
Why is “lede” spelled that way, and “Great lead” is spelled the other way?
Great point, my perspicacious daughter! I changed it. (I started out spelling lede “lead,” which wasn’t right. I corrected it after one commenter called me on it, but I just didn’t follow through to make the change on second reference.)
Also, I looked it up out of curiosity, according to Merriam Webster it is spelled “lede” so it wouldn’t be confused with “lead” (pronounced ‘led’) which referred to the strip of metal that would separate lines of type…interesting! But now I guess both spellings are acceptable.
An article that was “below the fold” was one that appeared on the bottom half of the front page of the newspaper. Circulation staff would place bundles of folded newspapers into outdoor vending machines. A story “above the fold” would be visible (for free!) to the world; if you wanted to read below the fold, as well as the rest of the newspaper, you would have to buy it, by putting your quarters into the slot, which unlocked the swinging door, and taking out one paper. At least, you were supposed to take only one paper.
Very good, Rod. Reporters always celebrated when we had an A-1 story, and moreso when it was “above the fold.”