Turns out, something as seemingly mundane as an internal naming convention can cause a mild controversy / confusion. Linotype machines cast these lead lines, containing text, onto printed pages (also probably where the term “typecasting” comes from!).ĮDIT June 7, 2016: on the importance of slugs A slug was the word for a line of lead, in those days. The boss would literally sit in the slot of the U, so that he/she could easily hand out assignments to people on the rim.Īs for “slug”, the answer is none of the above – the term comes from hot-metal printing. The terms “slot” and “rim” hail from the days when the copy desk was U-shaped. But why are slots called slots? And did “slug” come from the animal, the boxing term (e.g., “He slugged me in the chest”), or better yet, the word for a bullet fired from a gun (I watch a lot of Law & Order)? Of course, the process is more complicated IRL, and not every place works this way. This person reads through the story and makes sure it adheres to the style guide, writes captions, etc. The slot, who is the boss of the copy desk, assigns the story to the copy editor, aka the rim editor. Once the reporter and backfield / line editor(s) agree on a version of the story, they send it to the copy desk. There are also separate slugs used for print publication, as well as slugs attached to images and other parts of story content. For example, in this story the slug is “la-me-homeless-count” where “la” refers to Los Angeles, “me” refers to Metro (the story’s Section), and “homeless-count” refers to the topic of the story. The line editor assigns the story a slug, a combination of words that describe and form a unique code for the story. The line editor is also known as the backfielder or backfield editor in some newsrooms, these are different people, and the backfield editor gets the first read before the line editor. This person is usually the direct supervisor of the reporter. The line editor reads through the story line-by-line and makes changes to the structure and language as necessary. Let’s start with a suuuuper simplified workflow of the editing process for a story: Journalists pride themselves on avoiding jargon in their writing, but in the newsroom itself, it’s a different story.Ĭase in point: backfielders, slots, rims, and slugs … these are just some of the terms I heard in my first few weeks of working at the Times.
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