Xark!

21st century jargon: a list

Jargon is one of those things that gets a bad rap from journalists, and writers in general, because it's an evolved specialization of speech. When our lives require new terms to describe the issues we face on a daily basis, we create them. This specialization quickly distinguishes groups from the general population, which is why writers avoid jargon: it limits the audience for their work.

Here's a list I compiled while working as a consultant last year. I imagined a younger, college-educated me, teleported through time from 1985 into the meetings I was attending, and every time I heard a phrase that 1985-me would have tripped over or misinterpreted in its new context, I wrote it down.

Advertising is not enough

The ongoing death throes of TBD, a Washington-based local news site that launched in April, attract my attention because a talented friend of mine joined the venture last spring. I remember wishing him well in a coffee shop 11 months ago while thinking “I've got a bad feeling about this.”

Here's why, and it's not a complex answer. TBD, like practically every other for-profit media business in America, relies on advertising to pay its bills. The pitch for Web-only news ventures like TBD is that they'll turn a profit on low revenues because they come without the legacy costs of their newspaper-backed Web competitors.

What gets overlooked in these proposals is just how low those revenues typically turn out to be. Despite a rebound from their crash in 2009, Web ad rates remain so dismal that it's difficult to make money producing journalistic content online even when your company's main expense is newsroom payroll.