Nostalgia for Newspaper Lingo

Remember newspapers? Those soft, folded chunks of paper that you could open with a snap and hide behind at the breakfast table, getting ink all over your hands while you devoured stories from all over the world?

Yeah. Me neither. I get 99% of my news online and on the radio. I can’t even remember the last time I bought an actual newspaper. The day after 9/11, I think.

It seems as if newspapers are quickly becoming an artifact of the past. One day soon, asking a young person about a newspaper will be like asking them about a 45 RPM record or a cassette tape. They’ll be like, “Huh? A what now?”

If newspapers do go the way of the dinosaur, I will miss the newspaper phrases that have crept into popular culture (and who knows, maybe some of them will stick around). Some of my favorites:

• Below the fold—i.e., when a piece of content is placed low enough to where it is less likely to be read. The online equivalent of this, I suppose, would be anything after the first paragraph or two of text. In other words, I’m already there and I should probably stop writing now.
  
  
• After the jump—when a story is continued to another page. Long articles on some web pages use jumps too, though I’m not sure if they are called jumps (but they should be).
  
  
• “Stop the presses!” How can you not love this expression? Nothing in the online universe could possibly compare to it. What would you say? “Stop the mouse”? Hardly as dramatic or action-packed.
  
  
• “It was in the papers.” This is something people used to say when talking about a bit of news that everybody should be aware of. Why should they be aware of it? Because it was in the papers, and back then, everybody read the papers. The splintering of news content onto hundreds of different web sites makes me a bit sad. We have lost a common reference point that used to bring people together, at least in some small way.