Remember, the secret to all of this is just simple and easy to read. Most title pages use standard Courier 12-point font.

What does a screenplay look like? Your screenwriting software should make it easy for you to format the title page. Make sure you use them with intent and to emphasize things. Like a transition, I think you should use it sparingly since sometimes it takes away from the read. Indent: Left: 0.0' Right: 0.0' Width: 6.0'Ī shot tells the reader the focal point within a scene has changed. For example, you might need to use DISSOLVE TO: to indicate that a large amount of time has passed. “Hence,” he said, “one night a few weeks ago we had balloon-floater and marijuana-refer.As a spec scriptwriter, you should avoid using a transition unless there is no other way to indicate a story element. Reefer, is a summary item on the front page promoting an article on an inside page. A “floater” is a picture unaccompanied by an article, and a “refer,” pronounced Kevin Roche, an editor in news technology, pointed out that slugs sometimes have suffixes describing layout formats. Had a reply ready: “Because if it’s slugged FISCAL, it’s sure to go on. “I wrote the story on the new policy, and slugged it FISCAL.” Questioned about the unusual slug by Harold Gal, the night city editor, Mr. “There was a drought that hit the city back then, compelling City Hall to impose restrictions on water use - no hosing down sidewalks, no glasses of water in restaurants unless the customer specificallyĪsked, etc.,” Mr. Back when New York was returning from the brink of bankruptcy, articles were often slugged FISCAL. He recalled a story slugged WAR that reached the front page only after being renamed PEACE. He said that tricky editors had learned to give a story that had been held over for several days a sexier name. Now that’s a story I want to read.”Ī list of slugs as they appear in The Times’s print editing system. “A jazzy slug gives a story a more exciting feel at first glance than a humdrum one,” he said. Lacey said that slugs might appear insignificant, but they aren’t. David Dunlap,Ī Times reporter for decades, said that his standing slug after 9/11, REBUILD, was “used at a time when ground zero was seeing anything but rebuilding.” Sports avoided the word PUCK altogether, for fairly obvious reasons.”Įvergreen slugs include HEALTH, cranked out by Robert Pear, who estimates that more than half of his stories are so slugged CONG, a holdover from the four-letter days IMMIG and, all too often, SHOOT. “No one wanted an order to ‘KILL JEWS’ to wind up by mistake in print. “JEWS, if I remember correctly, was frowned on as a slug because of the kill problem,” Mr. Was preferred for murder stories because KILL could be confused with the order to drop a story,” he added, recalling that the newsroom often sent “kill” orders when articles needed to be spiked. “SCOTUS was a biggie for Supreme Court stories,” the longtime reporter and columnist Clyde Haberman said, citing the acronym for Supreme Court of the United States. Thus, the slug often became STAN.Ĭlassic slugs are still used. But this was a problem with Pakistan, whose four-letter abbreviated form, PAKI,

Britain would be shortened to BRIT, for example. REPUBS is strong.’ ”īefore The Times adopted a new print production system, slugs were four letters long. “Instead of saying, ‘Would you please shorten that article about President Obama’s immigration announcementīy 300 words?’ we say things like, ‘Take 300 out of IMMIG. “Slugs make life easier around the newsroom,” Mr.

Later huge Linotype machines turned molten lead into casts of letters, lines, sentences and paragraphs.Ī line of lead in both eras was known as a slug. The term slug derives from the days of hot-metal printing, when printers set type by hand in a small form called a stick. A monetary story about Greece is likely to be slugged DRACHMA, even though the country now uses the euro. Business also sidesteps conflicts by using currency names –Įven defunct ones. International reserves for any news out of Japan Business has to use JAPANECON, or some other alternative. If Business wants to write about the Japanese economy, for example, Country names are the province of the International Desk. The name can also be crucial in pitching stories to front-pageĮach article must have a unique name, and some desks “own” particular slugs. The naming of articles requires more coordination, foresight and concern than you might expect. Why? There is much in a name, especially in the newsroom. On the International Desk, the slug is PREXY. If the piece is produced on the National Desk, custom requires using the president’s In newspaper jargon, a slug is the name given to an article, and at The Times, stories about Mr. No, that’s not an insult to the president.

Slugline title page