Romps, Tots and Boffins

by Robert Hutton

  old lag • player over 30.

  opened his account • a hitman has ‘slotted one home’ for the first time at his new club.

  paceman • a fast bowler in cricket. A spin bowler is a ‘tweaker’.

  penned in • a football team found it difficult to get the ball out of their half.

  price tag • what clubs put on wantaway players.

  rifled home • he kicked the ball very hard ‘between the uprights’ and into the net. Which bit of the net? The ‘back of the net’.

  reeling • how the losing team was left after its drubbing.

  roar • the tone of voice in which football managers express opinions, and the way crowds celebrate goals.

  romp • the manner in which one team beat the other team by a wide margin. Players who go on to celebrate their romp with a romp are liable to make their way to the front pages, especially if vice girls are involved.

  rub of the green • sporting luck tends to manifest itself in ‘slices’.

  silverware • what victorious clubs bring home.

  slapped • how price tags get onto wantaway players.

  something in the half-time tea • the likeliest explanation for the team’s performance improving.

  splurge • how football clubs spend money on starlets.

  starlet • a slightly creepy way to refer to a young actress, and an absolutely routine way to refer to a young football player.

  SW19 • how the Post Office and sports reporters refer to Wimbledon.

  swoop • the manoeuvre by which football clubs buy new players.

  the dark old days • obligatory in opinion pieces referring to the time when football hooliganism used to get onto the front of the paper.

  wantaway • football player who would be open to transfer offers.

  wire • what the game went down to.

  * Deadlines are the biggest influence on many match reports. They need to be mainly written by half-time, which is why they tend to focus more on the goals in the first half.

  * It was originally coined by Crystal Palace manager Iain Dowie, and then promoted relentlessly by the TV show Soccer AM in a successful effort to get it into the dictionary. It’s now widely used without irony. Still laughing, Soccer AM? Fair enough, I expect you are.

  THE NUMBERS GAME

  It’s very dangerous to assert a number in copy if you don’t have to, especially if it’s a number you’ve worked out yourself. You’re bound to have miscounted, or forgotten something, or simply not know how to add up.* Much safer to be vague, while keeping in mind that faced with a choice, Always Use The Largest Number.

  a host of • sounds better than ‘a few’, and won’t look stupid if it turns out there are six. ‘A whole host’ works in the same way, except the threshold for looking stupid is seven.

  avalanche • just be sure it’s more than 20.

  bumper • what pay packets are. Or try ‘cash bonanza’.

  countless • best not to use this if a subsequent paragraph will reveal that whatever it is can be and indeed has been counted. And especially if it turns out the answer is ‘four’.

  droves • quite a lot. At least four scores, but not countless.

  eye-watering • he makes how much? That’s, what, 20 times what I get, and for what, banking? That’s basically just adding up.

  free fall • what prices went into.

  inflation-busting • what pretty much all pay rises were in the happy years running up to the credit crunch.

  litany • sounds like it should be quite a lot, but generally means one.

  myriad • at least five.

  package • half a raft.

  plummet • see plunge.

  raft • the standard unit of ‘measures’. Under the imperial system, a ‘cocktail of measures’ is an eighth the size of a raft. A ‘whole raft of measures’ is a raft plus a cocktail.

  rising • what crime is always doing. The job of Home Affairs correspondents at crime stats briefings is to find a number that has gone up, or failing that to force a statistician to concede that there is a number that may go up in the future.

  salvo • a myriad, but all at once.

  scores • see countless

  skyrocket • the way in which numbers increase. In the more sober broadsheets, use ‘soar’.

  spate • six.

  spree (of crimes) • more than 10, except in the UK, of murders, where it’s more than one.

  string • the standard measurement of lovers. For men, seven. For women, two.

  up to • look, there’s a whole range of numbers we could report, but we’re not going to waste your time. This is the very worst one we could come up with. Or try ‘as much as’ or ‘as little as’.

  * The newsroom definition of ‘genius’ is ‘someone who knows how to calculate a percentage’. Keep this in mind when reading newspaper stories derived from statistics.

  THINGS NEWSPAPER READERS SHOULD KNOW

  1. The number of pages in the paper doesn’t depend on the amount of news.* News is lumpy, rather than arriving at a steady rate. But with rare exceptions, papers don’t add pages on hot news days or cut them on quiet ones. So a story that might be close to the front on a slow day won’t make it at all on a busy day.

  2. There has to be a splash every day. The splash is the lead story in the paper. Because it’s on the front page, with a big headline, it looks very important. Often it is. Sometimes, it’s just the best we had. But it has to feel like it justifies the great big headline over it. One of the most valued skills in newspaper journalism is the ability to get a splash out of unpromising material. It’s even better if you can do it without writing ‘will spark outrage’.

  3. Not much happens at the weekend. That’s why Sunday papers don’t have many stories telling you about things that happened on Saturday. Instead, politicians use them to float ideas that can then be denied if they don’t go down well, and people with something to sell try to get favourable coverage by leaking some tidbits. And daily paper reporters are always grateful on a Friday to be given a good story to help fill a Monday paper that won’t be full of things that happened yesterday.

  4. Nothing at all happens in August.* Parliament’s away, the government’s away, celebs are away, there’s nothing good on TV. August is the News Desert. This is why we have the Silly Season, as stories that wouldn’t have a hope in March are asked to carry the weight of the splash. It is also why things seem to start happening abroad in August, as suddenly foreign stories can make their way unimpeded to the front.

  5. Not all polls are equal. Opinion polls four weeks out from an election asking people how they’re likely to vote are meaningful. Opinion polls asking people how they’d vote if a party had a different leader are much less so: it’s like asking people whether they’d enjoy a flavour of ice cream they’ve never tried. But these are at least opinion polls conducted by proper companies according to proper statistical rules. Marketing companies bombard newsrooms with ‘surveys’ and ‘research’ of much more dubious quality in the hope of getting their product mentioned in a story. Least useful of all are newspaper phone-in polls, which tend to reveal that ‘99 per cent of our readers AGREED with what we told them yesterday’.*

  6. Not all academics are equal. There isn’t really an Istituto Di Articoli Grandi in Milan, where spurious research is produced to order for Sunday broadsheets. But there might as well be.

  7. If the headline ends in a question mark, the answer’s probably no. Alan Beattie of the FT has formalised Beattie’s Immutable Law of Headlines: If there’s a question mark in the headline the answer is either (tabloid) ‘no’ or (broadsheet) ‘who cares?’ John Rentoul’s Questions to Which the Answer is ‘No!’ has much, much more on this.

  8. There may be an agenda. There are the obvious ones about politics, rivals and so on, but every now and then a paper makes an editorial decision totally baffling to those who don’t know that the editor has had a vendetta against another editor since they appear
ed on a panel show together in 1996. And it’s not just newspapers that have agendas. Journalists are always happy to quote independent experts and officials, especially when they’re attacking politicians, but it’s worth remembering that diplomats, doctors, senior soldiers, civil servants and academics are all quite capable of holding views and defending their own interests.

  9. There may be legal reasons. Why hasn’t anyone printed this thing I see on all the blogs? It may well not be true. Or it may be true, but true about someone rich and litigious. Or it may be true, but subject to a court order or rules designed to ensure people get a fair trial.

  10. You can usually ignore lists. Especially subjective ones, like the 100 Most Influential Collectors Of Journalese.* Unless you like lists, of course.

  * It depends on the number of adverts that have been sold.

  * Except the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the declaration of World War I, the invasion of Kuwait, the 1991 Russian Coup, the 2011 London Riots. But you know what I mean.

  * The exception to that rule is the 1999 Sun ‘You The Jury’ poll run after the paper argued at length that Britain should stay out of the Kosovo War. That one found Sun readers supported sending in troops by a margin of nearly two to one.

  * The only reason ever to read lists like that is to spot times when they’ve got to the Top 10, and realised they left someone essential out lower down, and will have to stick them in here, at the expense of someone else who was very important, but now won’t appear at all.

  TERMS OF THE TRADE

  These phrases aren’t journalese, in the sense that you’d never see them in a newspaper, but it’s hard to understand British journalism without knowing the language of our newspapers. A reporter never looks at a potential story without asking, ‘How will this fit in the paper?’ These are the words they use to answer that question.

  byline • the most important words in any story.

  byline bandit • the person in the office who kindly offered to take down some words you were phoning over, but totally forgot where they’d come from when it was time to file.

  embargo • news-providing organisations often send information or quotes out that aren’t to be used before a particular time. The benefit is twofold: it gives journalists time to read long reports properly before writing them up, and gives news-providers some control over where the stories appear – a midnight embargo keeps things off the evening TV bulletins, giving them a better chance in the morning papers. Their success depends on their being kept, which with hot stories and the 24-hour news cycle is a problem. In practice the words ‘strictly embargoed until midnight’ mean ‘expect to see this on Twitter around 10pm’.

  exclusive • there is some aspect of our report that you will not read anywhere else. Sometimes, it will be the word ‘exclusive’.

  headline • the bit in big letters at the top of the story.

  leaders • every day, newspapers offer small pieces of wisdom which, if only they were followed, would ensure the whole planet was as harmonious and well-run as a newsroom. Unfortunately, no one reads them.*

  masthead • the bit with the name of the paper on the front page.

  nib • stands for News In Brief, a three-paragraph single-column story of 60 words. Usually the product of a 90-minute drive, three hours standing in the rain, 400 words filed over a poor internet connection, and five minutes’ aggressive cutting by a sub-editor in a warm office.

  scoop of interpretation • an exclusive that involves seeing the same thing as everyone else and then coming to the opposite conclusion.

  skyline • the panel across the top of the paper with the masthead, placed there to remind journalists that what really sells the paper is the promise of a free sewing pattern (Daily Mail) or dinosaur poster (The Guardian).

  spike • to kill a story. A word derived from the days when sub-editors would have tall metal spikes on their desks, on which they could impale stories and, after a couple of drinks, bits of themselves.

  splash • the lead story on the front of the paper, which grabs the person passing the newsstand and says ‘Read Me Now Or Die Ignorant!’ Or, sometimes, ‘Will this do?’

  spoiler • a story run to undermine a rival’s big exclusive, generally by pretending to have the same story.

  spoof • a not-very-exciting front page put on the first edition of the paper to stop rivals stealing the very good scoop that will be appearing on the front of all the later editions, which have much larger print runs.

  standfirst • generally on features, an introductory sentence or two with the name of the interviewer in bold letters, but the name of the interviewee not, to remind you who the important person is in this piece.

  subhead • the bit underneath the headline, in smaller but still quite big letters, that explains the pun.

  * Philip Howard offers the best example of the view that leaderwriters have of their own importance. As the world stood on the brink of war in August 1914, the local paper of a small town in the west of Ireland took a stand: ‘We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you.’

  JOURNALISTIC SLANG

  If what follows appals you, remember that all trades and professions have their private horrors. A quick way to dispel uncritical admiration for the medical profession is to watch junior doctors sing ‘Nelly the Elephant’ while performing CPR on a dying patient.

  death knock • should a member or members of your family die in a potentially newsworthy way, one or more reporters will be dispatched to counsel you in your grief, and get every picture of the loved one that’s in the house.*

  doorstep • to actually leave the office and confront someone, generally at their home or office. Most fun if they’re caught running off on camera.

  flyer • a story that we hope is true, and that certainly seems pretty much likely to be probably true enough to run.

  plunder, pillage, poison the well • the correct technique for a death knock. Plunder: take your time and get every detail of the story – you may not be able to get back in if you miss something.* Pillage: the story won’t work without a picture, so get every photo of the deceased in the house – don’t come back without the album. Poison the well: as you leave, say: ‘Thank you so much. You shouldn’t have to go through that again. Here’s my card. If any reporters from other papers come round, tell them to give me a call and I’ll fill them in.’

  stick a kilt on it • the means by which a story that would be ideal in our Scottish paper but for its lack of the word ‘Scots’ in the first paragraph is brought up to scratch. Usually all that’s required is the insertion of a quote from a campaign group or politician based north of the border, but no link is too spurious.

  stitch-up • he thought he was giving me a story about his important diplomatic work. At some point he may realise I’m writing a story about his tour of Amsterdam brothels.

  too good to check • a tale that we suspect may not be true, but we wish to repeat anyway. A reporter setting off to investigate its veracity will be warned against ‘a phone call too far’.

  vicar • as in: ‘I better go after this one, I’m doing a vicar in Leicester tomorrow.’ This may only be used at the Sunday People, which has a strong line in clerical naughtiness.

  * This is how I described my job to my wife the first time we met. It was 15 months before she agreed to go on a date with me.

  * Useful tip: they’ll offer you tea. Accept, then drink it very slowly. No British person can bear to ask someone to leave before they’ve finished their tea.

  Acknowledgements

  This book has benefited from many contributors, and I’m grateful to them all. But I should make clear that responsibility for any errors rests with me alone.

  In putting it together I’ve been especially grateful for their support to my colleagues at Bloomberg News, a more enjoyable place to work than we like to let on. In particular to Andrew Atkinson, Eddie Buckle, Kitty Donaldson, Svenja O’Donnell, Thomas Penny, Gonza
lo Vina, Reed Landberg, John Fraher and James Hertling, who claims not to know what any of the words in the title mean.

  John Rentoul was a pioneer of books-from-Twitter-lists, and supporter of the journalese project from the start. He introduced me to his editor at Elliott and Thompson, Olivia Bays, who with her team made the production of this book much more straightforward and fun than I had expected.

  Although I can’t exactly recall the 4am conversation described in the introduction, Christopher Hope definitely came up with ‘pal’, ‘frogman’ and ‘lags’ for the original tweet, and has, sometimes unintentionally, offered a number of contributions since. Also waiting for the flight and throwing around ideas were Emily Ashton, Laura Pitel, Tim Shipman and Nick Watt. If you have to get stuck in an airport for the night, I recommend their company.

  Philip Cowley introduced a level of academic rigour to the book, although there are hints that his media contacts mean he is becoming a secondary journalese speaker.

  Patrick Hennessey explained Sport to me, and with Robert Watts offered many other contributions, including reminding me of David Wooding’s Elegant Variation on pizza. Barney Thompson supplied most of the Elegant Variations, and indeed suggested the category. More came from Andy Gregory, via Peter Sands. Ben Fenton suggested and supplied a significant portion of the Question of Attribution category.

  When I started compiling the list, I was pointed to Alison Gow’s ‘Journalism Clichés I Most Dislike’, now gone from the internet, but it provided several additions including, crucially, ‘romp’. Several of the terms in the Politics chapter were listed in an FT article by Lord Ashcroft. Fahd Husain’s December 2012 piece for The Nation, ‘Adjectivise This!’, was thoughtful about the effects of what foreign correspondents write on the places they cover, and provided several good pieces of journalese.