CoolStateLA/Glossary
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[edit] B
Beat
- Beat has many meanings and connotations in this context. For the purpose of the CMS, however, we can define a ‘beat’ as a topical organization of stories over an extended time period. Beats are sometimes organized geographically (The westside beat, the Seattle beat), sometimes by topic (the police beat, the culture beat), and sometimes idiosyncratically (the LA County Fair beat, the Blake trial beat), and to confuse matters more, there is a lot of news which refuses to organize itself into beats. The idea of a ‘beat’ simply gives us a handle to manage large chunks of our news universe. Beat definitions as well as assignments should be thought of as changeable and malleable. (In reality, this ‘chunking’ procedure may elude us in early versions of our CMS, but it could be a very valuable tool at some point.)
[edit] N
News Budget
- The results of the first filtering of stories. This list of stories is intended to be the group from which stories that will be published are taken. The function here is that people tasked with finding out what is going on in the world search databases, RSS feeds, news wires, newspapers, broadcast stories and other sources to begin to reduce the vast wave of stories available to a somewhat more refined list that are relevant to our news operation. In theory, it should be from this list that our stories are taken (though there are exceptions – in the realm of breaking news usually) – the vast majority of our stories will be taken from this list.
[edit] P
Peg
- A development or occurrence upon which a story or series of stories is based. For example, Sept. 11 is the anniversary of the 2001 attacks. 9/11 may be said to be the “peg” for a series of stories on Islamic Extremists, the rebuilding of lower Manhattan, or a reexamination of health issues suffered by workers at ground zero.
Pipeline
- A shorthand way of saying that a story is “in play”. Stories which have been formally adopted from the News Budget may be said to be officially “in the pipeline”.
[edit] R
Run List
- At the point which a story moves from the general “pipeline” to being committed to a specific edition, the story moves from the ‘pipeline’ to the ‘run list’. The run list is a sub-set of the ‘pipeline’ and indicates that the story has space reserved in a specific edition of the paper and begins the final production process. The run list is literally the list of stories to be included in a specific edition of the paper, even before that paper itself is actually laid out.
[edit] S
Slug
- Slug like “beat”, the word slug has more than one meaning. For our purposes, this is what we mean: the set of words and symbols at the head of the story which identifies not only the title of the story, but also the producer, the producer’s contact information (phone and email at minimum), the date/time of the submission, and a version number of the story so that editors and producers can keep track of which version of the story they are working on. Here is a sample slug:
“President Visits San Diego” <-----Story title Beaupre, Jon <-----Reporter/Producer 0709281330 V. 2.0 <-----date (yymmddhhmm) + Version No. 323.223.6287 <-----Phone jbeaupre@broadcastvoice.com <-----Email 000178 <-----Story number (if applicable)
Status Report
- Once stories have been identified as relevant and important to us (“put in play”), we need to know from time to time what is going on with this story. Generally, editors want to know who has been assigned to produced the story, what contacts they have made, any relevant research collected on the story, and of course, access to any drafts or rough edits of the story. The status report should be the first analysis of all the stories “in-play” at that moment. Show producers can make decisions about which stories will be appropriate for their show or edition, and which will require more work (more research, more content, more edits?). The status report should have provisions for reports by “beat”, by producer, by editor, and perhaps another couple of ways.
