Newsmagazine jargon of the 60s

Hugo hugovk at GMAIL.COM
Fri Mar 22 10:53:51 UTC 2013


The New Yorker has an interesting read by Calvin Trillin about his stint at
Time magazine in the sixties and their writing style ("Timestyle"). It
contains some journalism jargon, which I'm sure isn't new, but here's a
summary.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/03/time-magazine-calvin-trillin-memoir.html

 * newsmagazines: without a space
 * group journalism: reporters and stringers send files to the "Time Edit"
HQ. Researchers dig material out of libraries and the Times. Writers take
all this and compose their "tight narratives". Or: "some people work in the
first half of the week and some people work in the second half of the week".
 * correspondent: masthead name for a reporter
 * floater: "a utility infielder who was brought in to a section" to cover
sickness and vacations
 * associate or assistant editor: masthead name for a writer
 * instant omniscience: "the authoritative tone favored in those days at
Time"
 * the corrective “in fact”: "one of the tools employed to assert Time’s
authority"
 * At week’s end: Timestyle for "At the end of the week"
 * greening: process of marking words or passages with a green pen to be
cut. The red pen was for factual errors.
 * publetter: Letter from the Publisher, a weekly letter not written by the
publisher praising group journalism in heroic language
 * read-backs: "going over the finished version of a story with the
principal reporter, as a way of avoiding particularly egregious
misunderstandings"

Also:
"But long before Time Warner tycoons (a word invented by Time)"

The OED has this sense of tycoon earlier from 1861 and 1886 but also cites
a 1926 Time: "Fred W. Fitch, 56, rich hair-tonic tycoon". 100% Timestyle!

And a modern one, Twitterization:
"Even before the complete Twitterization of the public attention span—even
before practically nobody, busy or not, waded through a lot of
newspapers—Time, which had been invented as a succinct way of keeping busy
men informed, found itself using as an advertising motto “Make time for
Time.”"

Here's Twitterization in BusinessWeek's Technology Insider newsletter of
June 05, 2007:
===
The Twitterization of Blogs
Most bloggers prefer mundane tidbits to deep thoughts, and backed
by voice transcription and video sharing, the cell phone may soon
be the tool of choice
===
https://groups.google.com/group/EverGreenMessages/browse_thread/thread/ad5ddbf2f18904f/b8e3fae5c941f335?q=Twitterization

Catherine Holahan's original article is from the day before:
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-06-04/the-twitterization-of-blogsbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice

cheers

Hugo

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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