CUL-DE-SAC

I’m a journalist and I work in a newsroom that isn’t print or broadcast. It’s both. In fact it’s all three. Every reporter, who does a story, is expected to produce it for television and radio, and they have to write a print version for the station’s website. If this sounds crazy you may have a point and reporting on three platforms has its challenges.

Here’s one. Cultures are different from one medium to the next. So is the lingo.

A verbatim quotation from a source you’ve interviewed is called a “quote,” but only in print. On radio, that quote is reproduced in audio and it’s called a “bite,” as in soundbite. But in TV it’s called a SOT. A what? SOT is an acronym that stands for Sound On Tape, even though nobody uses tape anymore (all modern technology is digital) and on TV it’s not just sound, it’s video too.

So what do you call a quotation from a source? Where I work it depends who you’re talking to.

After we started producing our daily evening television show I learned another piece of TV jargon. Pop. This refers to a piece of environmental sound you use to lend a story information or atmosphere. In radio we called it ambience. A normal human would call it… well, I guess they’d just call it sound.

There are other differences in jargon that are even more back-office. A short, produced broadcast story is called a package or a “mini” among the TV people. Radio people a superspot, not to be confused with a mere spot. By the way, if a radio story (spot news or otherwise) doesn’t have any ambient sound it’s just acts and tracks. Acts means actualities (soundbites in other words) and tracks are the reporter’s recorded voice tracks.

A “pinwheel” is a collection of stories by different reporters that are linked in a single broadcast. One reporter does her SOQ (Standard Outcue) then the next reporter states his name and launches the next story.

A similarly connected collection of voices of interviewees (on radio) is called a VOXPOP, and of course you can’t do your VOXPOP until you do you gather your MOS. Those are Man On the Street interviews, in case you wondered.

The former newspaper reporters in our newsroom are typically old dogs who think journalism is going to hell and their jargon is the most exotic. We give them puzzled looks when they ask why your story doesn’t have a nut graph. You can prewrite most stories, they say, just assemble the A-matter and fill in the news at the top when it arrives.

Okay, a nut graph is the paragraph in a feature story that tells what the story is about, and it typically follows the anecdote or scene-setter that opens the piece. A-matter is background information on a subject that remains the same whether the subject is current or past, alive or dead.

Obits are assemblies of prewritten A-matter that are just waiting for someone to die. Was it cancer or heart disease? That’s the news you fill in at the top of the piece. Did I explain what a piece is? You know what I mean.

The language that we call jargon serves a purpose. It’s conversational shorthand, of course. But it also tells us who’s in and who’s out. If you know the jargon you’re a member of the club. And the inability to agree on what you call a quote means you’ve got a workplace with social schisms.

Will the TV, radio and newspaper people at KPBS ever forge a common language? I dunno.

Let me say one more thing. There’s one old newspaper expression I’ve always loved. The highest compliment you can pay a reporter’s writing is to tell them their copy sings. Hearing that would be music to my ears! But that’s a cliche. Shit.

You want to trust what your brain tells you. But my father is delusional. That’s what his doctor said.

He has reached his 90th birthday but not with everything intact. I look at a photo of him and my mother, taken three years ago when my daughter had her first communion. And I remember that as a time when he was still himself. He looks a long way away in that picture.

Now he doesn’t recognize my mother most of the time. I didn’t know this until about a month ago when he called me at home.

“Is mom there?” he asked me. I told him she wasn’t and asked why he wondered. Wasn’t she at home in their condo?

“I haven’t seen her for several days,” he said. She was in the next room. I know because I called a few minutes later and she picked up the phone.

A long time ago he joked that if he became senile one day, “Just give me a sandbox to play in.” It would be easy if we could just humor him. Sure dad. There are three other women who say they’re my mom. That’s okay. Sure dad. You got on a plane this morning and ended up in a strange place even though it looks just like your bedroom. But don’t worry.

It isn’t an old man re-entering the sweet innocence of childhood. It’s a former adult insisting what he thinks is true. He argues about it and my mother is getting tired of the arguments. I’m getting tired of the arguments.

He doesn’t have far to go in this life and I want him to be in a peaceful place while it lasts. Jim Fudge isn’t himself anymore. And I don’t know what to do about it.

Update Feb. 2016: This story has had a happy ending. Some trial and error in the use of medication has made my dad better. He recognizes my mom now, and seems to be his old self; his old old self at least. Though when you talk about happy endings you’ve got to remember Yogi Berra said it ain’t over ’til it’s over. That’s true of baseball games and of life.