The next miracle (v11.0): Owen Youngman

Every profession has its trade language, a lexicon of words and phrases whose functions include specialized instruction, efficient communication, quick context-setting, or even exclusion of outsiders from comprehension.

Or none of the above.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, columnist John Kelly paused to note the passing of a couple of verbs from the daily use inside the Post’s content management system: “spike” and “kill.” “To ‘spike’ a story is to eliminate it before it sees print,” he explains. “It has its origins in a physical act” – impaling a piece of staff or wire copy on a huge metal spike after it is adjudged unneeded for tomorrow’s paper. In the Post’s new Methode CMS, “spike” has been replaced by “delete.”

I know whereof he speaks.  I used some enormous spikes in my days on the Chicago Tribune sports desk, and spiked hundreds of pieces of paper a day.  But a spike had a second, equally important function, one that I suppose Methode would need to call “undelete”:  If I tossed something into an enormous wheeled wastebasket, it was gone. If I spiked it and later decided I shouldn’t have, it would be a trivial exercise to flip through even a huge stack to retrieve it.

Anyway, reading the Post piece caused me to start noting down a list – a peculiar and particular mixture of fading catchphrases, attempts at humor, arcane terms of art, and other shorthand from 37 years in the Tower. Many of those locutions that have not yet vanished from the earth have, like “spike,” become disconnected from their historical, physical referents. Others may have been disconnected at birth. At any rate, here are just three, for my benefit as much as future generations’.

light – the final obstacle in a process, be it human or machine; always preceded with “the”

Not the San Antonio Light, although that’s gone, too. Instead, through a miraculous transitive property, “the light” referred to each of several items required to get an edition to press.

Originally, you’d have been talking about one of two red light bulbs, one in the newsroom and one in the composing room, that served as a signal that an edition had finally closed and that the presses would soon roll. The foreman of the stereotype department flipped a switch when the last press plate had been made and sent down to the presses, the red lights were illuminated, and attention officially turned to the next replate, or the next beverage from the lower right desk drawer.

Over the years, though, clock-watching editors and compositors standing in the composing room also found it handy to refer to that final page, when still lacking its final pieces of hot metal, as “the light” (“Page 3’s gonna be the light tonight, we’re waiting for an update on the GOV story”).  And so that final, laggard story would also be “the light” – and, ultimately and ignominiously, so would its reporter (“Swanson, you’re the light! Would you file the last take already?”).

muskox – a very, very, very long story, generally from overseas, with no particular news peg

When we’re talking about the days of hot type (as we just were), we’re talking about a time when it took a long time to get a story ready for publication . . . even once it had avoided being spiked. The mechanical requirements alone could easily delay an edition (and the light!) by 45 minutes to an hour: if a big hole in a page suddenly opened up because an ad or story didn’t show up, setting enough type to fill said hole could take several Linotype operators and plenty of lead, plus a particularly talented and cooperative compositor.

A Norwegian muskox

And so it was standard practice to have long stories in type, in galleys, waiting. Already proofread, always set in standard one-column measure, these pieces needed to have only their first line reset to add an actual date to the dateline (e.g. “TOBOLSK, Siberia, Dec. 14” instead of “TOBOLSK, Siberia, XXXX XXX”). Standing obituaries served a similar purpose, if a more noble one, as the decedent’s decease generally had actual news value and something needed to get into the paper even if the deadline were just 5 minutes away. Not so the mighty muskox.

Ah, why “muskox,” that noble Siberian beast?  Newsroom lore had it that one particularly long story – several columns in length, in fact, a redoubt against even the largest sudden catastrophe – was on the subject of muskoxen. It hung around so long that all such stories came to be called “muskox,” even if they happened to be about wildebeests, or fish or trees or Asiatic cuisine. Wire editors came to recognize a good muskox story both by its heft and its distinguishable lack of a news aroma, and copy editors whiled away the first hours of every shift rendering them into Tribune style for an audience that, as a rule, would never see them.

Generally, these were wire stories. Occasionally, a Tribune correspondent’s own piece might wind up as muskox – and it was then that you’d know he either was on bad paper with some subeditor, or that he’d stumbled across a subject of no earthly interest. At least the desk could tell him it was in type “and might run on Sunday.”

Breaking news, when the model was less broken

Conway – Something that is already universally known; often preceded by the word “Thanks”

It wasn’t just the pounding of manual typewriters and the curses of curmudgeonly assistant city editors that made newsrooms a noisy place. Once upon a time, clattering wire-service printers stood around the newsroom, spitting out the latest raw material from the AP or the City News Bureau. Near a deadline, copy boys – er, copy clerks – hovered near them, ready to tear off each individual story (and, perhaps, to spike its carbons).

Off deadline, bored or curious desk editors would wander up and look at the wires, too.  Legend has it that one telegraph editor – that’s what we used to call the national copy desk, the “telegraph” desk; the foreign desk was the “cable” desk, for reasons that should be self-evident – liked to wander into the sports department, check the wires, and loudly announce, “Orioles lose!”  His name, the old-timers told me, was Conway. And he generally was announcing news that had moved on the wires two hours before.

There apparently was no use in telling him his news was old. After a while, the sports desk merely took to responding, “Thanks, Conway!” After a further while, he retired or disappeared or died, and his first name was lost to the mists of time. But the habit of yelling “Thanks, Conway!” in response to old news outlived him, to be re-introduced to, and perpetuated by, succeeding generations.

And so it was that any piece of outdated news (“Hey, Dewey actually didn’t defeat Truman!”) became a “Thanks Conway,” or just a “Conway,” efficiently conveying two important newsroom commodities: superior knowledge and a sense of derision.

If you knew this already, you also know that it’s time for your response.