The snake rule, or words we keep in newsrooms for no good reason

To this day, almost no one in a modern newsroom knows what a pica pole is, with the exception of myself and a few veterans old enough to remember computers that needed a boot disk.

Like many things that have disappeared, the pica pole once was an essential tool for laying out a newspaper. Now it makes for a good backscratcher when the shift gets long.

Language is an essential part of any given culture — or subculture, if you want to get deep in the weeks. The culture of the newsroom has had more changes than most areas in American life, and much of it in the last 25 years or so. The changing demographics of the nation’s workplaces have definitely altered the face of newsrooms, though not enough to be truly reflective of the populations they cover as of yet or to properly reflect the growing ranks of women journalists. The economic and societal forces outside the newsroom have also shifted the practices and culture within the newsroom, and none moreso than the accelerating supplanting of the paper product with online news.

Yet we hold on to the words and phrasees that mean little or nothing to the young journos coming up through the ranks. They learn the terms as they assimilate into newsroom culture, but few really understand that those words belong to a more analog era.