I’ve been working as [a journalism-adjacent programmer](https://srccon.org) for [some time](https://carlana.net/ed-employment.html). It’s an area I find very rewarding, but no job is without its downsides. Let’s face it: for people whose job involves writing professionally, [journalists are bad at spelling][1]. "Hed", "lede", and other bits of jargon are just part of the problem. The deeper issue is that every publication has its own nomenclature, and jargon has drifted in meaning since the switch to web publication. ["Slug", for example,](https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/24/whats-in-a-slug/) began as a literal slug of lead melted into a row of letters by a [Linotype machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU). Now, it generally refers to a ["short label for something, containing only letters, numbers, underscores or hyphens"][5], and it might mean the keywords in a URL _or_ an internal ID system used by a publication for editorial workflow. Those two meanings overlap but aren’t actually the same, which leads to confusion when developers talk to journalists and editors. [1]: https://underthecurve.github.io/jekyll/update/2016/12/29/hed-dek-led-graf.html [2]: https://forms.gle/ud4tz6rjMtD7fQJ49 [3]: https://twitter.com/carlmjohnson/status/1181996712417730563 [4]: https://gist.github.com/earthboundkid/60ea87499daabc7fd08dac4dd10febb8 [5]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/glossary/#term-slug [6]: https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/commits?author=carlmjohnson [7]: https://www.spotlightpa.org/ [8]: https://newsnerdery.org I [have been working on][6] the website for [Spotlight PA][7], and I wanted to try to give the parts of an article more-or-less standard names in our CMS. There was only one problem: just what are the standard names? To find out, I made [a survey][2] and asked [in chatrooms][8] and [on Twitter][3] for other news nerds to fill it out. - - - I started with a basic article header and just asked participants to label the parts of the story and to rate how confident they were in their rating: was this just a guess or had they actually used this term at work? (The confidence scale was [a bit wonky](https://twitter.com/mikamckinnon/status/1182001962792865794), but I think it got across what I wanted to know.) Here is the header: {{< figure src="/post/img/2020-article-bits1.png" alt="A typical article header" width="580" >}} The first question was probably the hardest: What do you call those little text bits in the corner near stories? An incredible 11 people just skipped this question altogether. There was no clear consensus answer, but "kicker" was the plurality choice. "Eyebrow" is something I had never heard until recently, but apparently is the accepted term at [The Philadelphia Inquirer](https://www.inquirer.com) among other publications. For what it’s worth, when I was at [The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com), we said both "kicker" and "rubric" (only 2 votes!), but distinguished them by saying a rubric was kicker that was also a section link. The Atlantic’s current CSS still says "rubric". "Tag" or "section" are also somewhat popular. "Overline" sounds journalistic. "Flag" isn’t bad. I would avoid "slug" because it already has too many different meanings. Negative points to the person who wrote that "The Capitol" is Philadelphia. (_It’s Harrisburg!_) - - - As a developer, I’m used to calling this the "title" because HTML has a `