The Morbid Language of Newspapering

From the Poynter Institute for Media Studies

THE MORBID LINGO OF NEWSPAPERING

In newspapers death is not limited to the obit page. Journalists speak a jargon filled with images of death and violence.

First a beat reporter slugs his story. If the story is news, he writes in a style called a pyramid, which is a tomb, even turned upside down. The story begins with a news hook and ends with a kicker.

At the bottom of the story, the reporter writes “—30—,” a telegraphic symbol for “the end” and a metaphor for death.

The story fills a news hole, a shallow grave left by advertising.

Now a coven of editors works over the copy. Editors cut, kill and bury stories. They take dead stories and spike them.

Some editors, perhaps on the graveyard shift, have earned nicknames like “Hacksaw,” “Butcher” and “The Knife.”

Editors also write cutlines, drop heads and jump heads. To save space they eliminate widows. They hold meetings called post-mortems where, bloody with red ink, they conduct autopsies on tear sheets. They take composed matter and decompose it.

Even punctuation is violent. Exclamation points are bangers or screamers! (When an editor yells, “Put a banger on that head!” duck.) Stories are riddled by bullets.

In layout, editors sometimes bump heads. The result is tombstone makeup.

In the days of hot type, pressmen threw lead scraps into a bin called a hell box. Now we have computers and cold type. Stories are written on a terminal. Buttons on terminals say cut, kill, search and destroy, purge, execute and expire. Hit the wrong button on some terminals and “Fatal Mistake” flashes across the screen.

Sometimes the system crashes, dooming all stories to electronic oblivion.

Finally, a newspaper is put to bed and an editor yells, “We’re dead for tonight.” The next day, all stories in the edition are sent to the morgue. Then the undertaking starts all over again, the race toward deadline.

—Roy Peter Clark, news coach and language mortician
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies (~1980)