Newspaper terminology

Sunday 21 December 2003This is more than 21 years old. Be careful.

One of the interesting things for me about blogging is that it brings journalism thinking to non-journalists. One of the side-effects of this is that it brings journalist-speak to non-journalists as well. For example, Mark Pilgrim, in his tutorial about cruft-free URLs, refers to the text label for a story as a “slug”. This is newspaper jargon, of which there is much more. Jon Udell is the perfect crossover spokesman, being both a journalist and a blogger. He wrote a while back about Heads, decks, and leads.

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I got all my knowledge of newspaper terminology from Bill Walsh over at The Slot -- he's a copy-editor for the Washington Post.
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A few years ago, we settled on a content-management system for our Web site. We should've realized right away there would be major problems when they started calling our decks "subheads" and our subheads "decks." :-).

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