By Stacey Woelfel, RTNDA Chairman

I’m about to give up.  I’ve tried my best for years—and thought I had it beat—but they’re ganging up on me again and I don’t think I have the stamina to beat them back one more time.  It comes like a sneak attack, right out of thin air.  You’re having a conversation with another media professional—someone who knows the ins and ours of the business—when suddenly they let you have it.  I guess that’s why I never expect it.  Someone who works in this business should know better.  But it just happened to me again today: “Uh, Stacey, I’m about to go out and film my story.”  There it is.  She actually said she was going to film her story.  Like a thousand times before, I resist the urge to say “OK, but I’m only going to give you 100 feet, so make it last!”  Instead, I tell her to keep me posted on how it goes and shrug off this anachronistic bit of speech.

The funny thing is, the word “film” pretty much died out in TV newsrooms 25 or 30 years ago.  ENG moved in, the CP16s moved out, and that was that.  All of us working back then quickly embraced terms like “raw tape,” “file tape” and “tape operator” because they meant a cool change was going on in our newsrooms.  We didn’t want to use the word “film” because it would have given people the idea we were behind the times.  But flash forward more than 20 years to the time I first heard the word “film” start to pop up again among young reporters.  I at first just shrugged it off as an odd coincidence that a couple of people would use this term from the disco days.  But them I heard it more and more.  It couldn’t be just a coincidence.  For some reason “film” was making its way back into my newsroom—at least in the spoken form.

While puzzling over why that might be, I started to take an inventory of all of the anachronisms we use in our business.  Most people still say they’re sending out resume tapes, even though DVDs are now pretty much the common medium on which to seek out new work.  So why keep the “tape” stuck to what we call it?  I suspect it’s a combination of not wanting to just say “resume,” thinking that will also refer to the paper vitae enclosed.  And saying “resume disc” or “resume DVD” just sounds strange.  A few people have thrown out “resume reel,” but that’s just as incorrect as “tape” (because I, for one, do not keep my DVDs on a reel of any type).

“B-roll” is a newsroom term that’s pretty much the cockroach of the TV journalism vocabulary.  After nuclear blasts have scoured the planet of all human life, I’m pretty sure cockroaches and the word “b-roll” will still be around to rule the Earth.  Now, readers not yet reaching 50 may not even know where the word “b-roll” came from—but I bet you’ve used it to talk about the video to cover your voice track.  Permit me a brief history lesson, if you will.  Nixon-era TV newsrooms often had film projector systems (called film “chains,” but that steely etymology will have to wait for another column) that allowed operators to play two pieces of film simultaneously.  The “A-roll” was the main film of the story, usually an interview.  The “B-roll” was another piece of film played at the same time to which the director could cut to break away from the A-roll footage.  In today’s digital playback world, there’s no film, no A-roll, nothing to roll at all.  But the term persists. 
I could go on about these anachronistic terms, but I come to bury B-roll, not to praise him.  Forget what I said before.  I’m fighting back.  I may be in this alone, but I’m going to do my best to rid the news vocabulary of its archaic expressions.
Stacey’s Anachronism-Free News Vocabulary:

                 

Outdated Term	Modern Term
Film My Story	Record My Story
Resume Tape	Resume Video
B-roll	Illustrative Video
Sound on Tape (SOT)	Sound on Digital (SOD)
Cut	Edit

Those are a few starting examples.  Who has more?  Post them below or to my Facebook profile.  C’mon, who’s with me here?  We can rally the powers that be to make this stick.  Let me just get my phone and dial some of my friends…  Uh oh, did I just say “dial” the phone?
 

POST A COMMENT

Are you trying to lighten up?

First off -- you made me try to spell "anachronisms" which without a spell checker I have not a clue!! Your original blog entry is not visible to copy :)

I figure you're trying to lighten up in these troubled times but come on. Film - yes. It HAS to go. No one around any newsroom I've worked in uses it -- but that's metro NYC. They sometimes talk differently beyond the Hudson.
There's nothing wrong with "resume DVD". Tells it like it is. Just the facts. Resume video begins to sound -well - too much like cell phone video and YouTube.
But some things are just sacred. Like B roll and SOT. sound on digital???? Oh Please! These are terms as you rightly pointed out borrowed from film. All film. Like movies too. Let it be. And let's concentrate on teaching our youngest journalists how to research, identify facts, ask good questions and write and speak the English language (really tough!!!).
You know -- you're not always "standing up" for your standup either :)