7 Dirty Words You Can't Say In Newspaper Buildings
I heard an hour of the 24-hour George Carlin marathon on XM Radio last week — ah, the wonders of digital programming — and that got me to thinking about taboos in the news trade. 
So, just what might be the Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say In Newspaper Buildings today?
Try these, and feel free to add your own:
- Newspaper: The word itself speaks of an almost bygone era.
- News: The news itself is problematic, as we all live in a news bubble in which the news finds us as much as us going out and finding it. Who can sell advertising around, well, "news." Advertisers want niches — business readers, techies, health enthusiasts, action movie watchers, not perusers of "general news."
- Paper: That one’s now worse than news. With Goldman Sachs, followers of the newsprint trade, today upping its estimate of year-over-year pricing increases to 30% from 20%, just forecast on May 27!, paper itself becomes a dirty word. And just why is it that all those Indians and Chinese have a newfound love of newspapers?
- Circulation: With the old-age disease of arteriosclerosis ("degenerative changes in the arteries, characterized by thickening of
the vessel walls and accumulation of calcium with consequent loss of
elasticity and lessened blood flow") setting in with ferocity (three percentage point declines each six-month reporting period for almost four years now), remember it’s not circulation, it’s readership. - Staff: Pronouced like "staph". Reporters have always been a necessary pain in the butt, but now they’re, well, less necessary. Less newsprint to fill, fewer dollars left to pay people, the staff cuts have now become breathtaking, almost 6000 this year in the industry, as logged by Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts. See also "FTE."
- Editor: You remember, the guy who decided the news we’d see the next morning. Now as readers flee print, it’s partly the fault of those arrogant editors. News companies replace one "e" with another; as AP and Gannett call in the ethnographers.
- Default: Consider this a double entendre. Default as in, we’re not going to make that debt payment (see Philly, the Strib). And, as in, it’s not my (de) fault. It’s not been Craig Newmark’s fault, and soon Sam Zell will be telling us it ain’t his. As the biggest blame game we’ve ever seen starts to set in on an industry, we’ll figure out that there’s more than enough to go around.