Learning to write and speak TV journalism

A few weeks ago, my cousin, who had just started law school, was telling me about his newly acquired vocabulary.

"It's amazing," he said. "Now I see a woman trip on the sidewalk or an orange fall from a crate, and I think, 'That's a contract,' or, 'That's a tort.' "

With only one homework assignment behind him, he was already accumulating the basic building blocks to construct more complicated legal cases. And though at a very different point along my own career path, I told him that his recent experiences were not unlike mine. Nearly done with an eight-week internship at Dateline NBC, I too would be ending the summer with an entirely new glossary of terms. Just like my cousin, I was not paid — but my compensation was a thorough understanding of the process that leads to airing stories for one of television's most watched news magazines.

"Dubbing," logging, "basys," "b roll," "time coding," "tracking," "screening," "post," "chyron."

At first the words made me think of Newspeak, from George Orwell's, "1984." They were part of a journalism language from the Inner Party not meant to be spoken by proletariat interns like me.

I would make a left turn at the water cooler and find five producers watching a video while typing numbers and words into a computer with the skill and confidence of a concert pianist. They called it "logging" — and I was both eager and terrified to try it myself.

But how much detail should I use to describe each scene? Should I record the time when a view of a boat speeding on a lake changed perspectives? And would I label that as a pan right or a tilt right? And what was the difference between panning and tilting anyway?

My dictionary of terms continued to expand as I added words that referred not only to the production of a piece but to its promotion — to assuring an appropriate audience after the crew's laborious efforts.

A "clip reel," I soon learned — as I sat in Edit Room 4 pulling tapes from a cart and pointing to parts in the scripts that had been circled in red — comprised the highlights of the show. Promotion would choose bytes from the clip reel and assemble them into a kind of "teaser" — like the preview tap dance number we would perform during assembly at my high school so students would stop to buy tickets.

It was like a TV preview for a movie, showing the most dramatic, thought-provoking and emotionally wrenching scenes that might appear in the segment.

But, unlike at the movies, the viewer hadn't paid nine dollars and wouldn't give a second thought to switching the channel. It's not enough to say that the middle-aged housewife sitting home on her couch on a Tuesday night likes Dateline. "Judging Amy," which also airs at 10 p.m., appeals to her sex and age group, so why air a Dateline segment about adopted twin sisters who have been united for the first time at age 40? Better to appeal to the woman's husband and put on a consumer alert piece about car dealerships.

I had developed a new vocabulary with more than just the words relating to production. I had learned the vocabulary of the subject — the anxious intonation of the clerk trying to resell a refurbished camcorder from 1996 for $200 over list price; a nurse's tired confessions from the witness stand to a woman who had murdered two babies in day care; the concern of a young gymnastics teacher over whether the room where she would be interviewed about her struggle with Lyme Disease would be too cold.

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Journalism may have its own intricate vocabulary but each segment is its own language. The viewer sits and imagines for 20 minutes that he is stranded at sea with no hope of returning home. But the producer has spent hours feeling the rapid rise of the ocean waves, as he sits in a small boat and instructs the cameramen.

The entire crew translates the foreign language so millions of Americans can add new words to their own vocabulary. And similarly, I had translated the words of a foreign profession — with its accents, adjectives and innuendos — into something more basic and comprehensible: a love for television journalism and its own universal language.

Jessica Lautin is a 'Prince' staff writer from New York.

'A Glimpse Within' is a weekly column in which we ask members of the Princeton community to share personal experiences. The 'Prince' welcomes submissions of about 650 words to The Newsroom.