An Intro By Any Other Name...
Every business develops its own specialized language, (even NPR); linguists say we have an innate need to baffle outsiders, but it can be useful shorthand. For example, the show we did yesterday with Bela Fleck and Chick Corea is known as a "performance chat," a form pioneered at NPR by Weekend Edition Sunday. Or, more usually, a "perf chat," started by WeSun.
Even within the same business, "dialects" change. Those who've toiled at other radio operations will be confused by Nipper's argot. An intro is an intro everywhere, I think, but what is known elsewhere as a "tag" we call a "back announce." Why? Who knows.
The musical interludes played between segments don't really have an industry equivalent -- commercial radio stations play what they call "sounders" -- but we call ours "buttons." In production, a sound bite is known elsewhere as "SOT" -- which stands for "sound on tape" (no, nobody uses tape anymore) and pronounced as if it was a habitual drunk. We call it an "actuality" or an "act" for short. An NPR reporter will go into a studio to record remarks ("voice tracks") to go in between the actualities, and that type of story ("piece") is known as "acts and trax." And nobody at NPR would understand what the rest of the business calls a ROSR (pronounced "roser"), which stands for "radio-on-scene-report," which is a semi-spontaneous description of, oh, say a fire that runs about thirty seconds or so for use in newscasts.
We don't have commercials in public radio, but we do insert "funders" -- those underwriting announcements read by Frank Tavares. Some especially cheeky directors call them "ads."
Gotta run.
6:59 AM ET | 05-23-2007 | permalink
