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Oct

6

Press release mystery solved


- 30 -

 

How many times have you seen that at the end of a press release? And did you know what it meant? Maybe you didn’t care?  Why should you?

 

I’d often thought of asking Wendy Hoke what it meant, or emailing the folks who sent the pressers and asking them, what’s it mean?!?!  But I always figured it was one of those thing that would just make me look even more of a neophyte, no matter how much some people refuse to believe that that’s the case when I say it is.

 

Well, I’m no longer in the dark, thanks to the American Journalism Review:

So where did the term originate? Some say the mark began during a time when stories were submitted via telegraph, with “-30-” denoting “the end” in Morse code. Another theory suggests that the first telegraphed news story had 30 words. Others claim the “-30-” comes from a time when stories were written in longhand — X marked the end of a sentence, XX the end of a paragraph and XXX meant the end of a story. The Roman numerals XXX translate to 30.

But these are hardly the only explanations, theories and guesses for the rise of “-30-”. It is rumored that a letter to an East India company ended with “80,” a figure meaning “farewell” in Bengali. The symbol supposedly was misread, changed to 30 and took root. Some say the mark comes from the fact that press offices closed at 3 o’clock. And there’s the theory that 30 was the code for a telegraph operator who stayed at his post during a breaking news story until his death 30 hours later — versions of that story even include that the unfortunate operator hit two keys on his machine when he collapsed. Which ones? That’s right, 3 and 0.

Julie Williams, a professor of journalism and mass communication at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, says the guessing game over “-30-” has taken on a life of its own, in part because the ambiguity leaves it open to a wide array of interpretations. “Because it’s so obviously not intuitive, you can’t tell what it means,” she says. “I think people were anxious to come up with explanations for it.”

So what’s the answer?  Doesn’t seem to be one.

 

But essentially, the cook’s “86 it!” is basically the writer’s “- 30 -.”  (And here’s where “86″ comes from – learned it in my waitressing/hostessing days – my kids love the story about how I got 86′d from the job, cried and got the job back.)

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:55 pm October 6th, 2007 in Culture, Media 

Comments

4 Responses to “Press release mystery solved”

  1. 1 Matt Wootton on October 7th, 2007 12:48 am

    How timely! Believe it or not, I just got back from a trip to NYC today, where I took a food tour in Greenwich Village where Chumley’s is located. The guide told us that Chumley’s used to be a speakeasy back during prohibition days, and would get tipped off before the cops were going to make a raid. They’d get a call on their telephone where the caller would say “Eighty Six!”, and then hang up, which of course, meant it was time to shut down the works, pronto.

  2. 2 Jill Miller Zimon on October 7th, 2007 10:47 am

    Hey Matt – thanks for reading and commenting. Did you know where the “86″ came from before the tour? Just curious. I was a waitress from age 16 or 17 through 21 so that’s when I learned it.

  3. 3 Dave Hickman on October 7th, 2007 1:30 pm

    Gosh Jill,

    Real brilliant. I keep sayin’ you should take Journalism 101 since you keep professin’ to be such a grand and glorious “journalist.”

    As I’ve written on several occasions, you don’t even know the basics of Journalism !!!

    -30-

  4. 4 John Ettorre on October 8th, 2007 10:50 am

    Ignore this guy, Jill. There’s an important dynamic at work here called the “amateur spirit,” which is all about learning something with fresh eyes. You’ve got that, along with all the good instincts anyone ever needed as a writer or a journalist. And if you must defend yourself against boorish types like this, just remind them that the only journalism training Mike Royko ever had (other than decades of practicing it, which is where you really learn it) was staying up all night reading a book about journalism in preparation for an interview for a position on his Air Force base newspaper. The proof is in the doing, not the formal training. Just do your thing, and ignore the jealous naysayers.

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