Slug

In journalism and content management, a slug is a short, unique identifier used internally to label a story as it moves through editing, production, and publication. The term predates digital media: in hot-metal typesetting, a "slug" was a line of cast metal type, and newsroom desks adopted the word to mean a one- or two-word handle scribbled at the top of a wire story or copy sheet so editors could track it. Today the slug still serves that traffic-control function, but it has acquired a second, related meaning on the web.

In web publishing and content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, and most static site generators, the slug is the human-readable portion of a URL that identifies a specific page — for example, the paris-agreement in example.org/glossary/paris-agreement. Web slugs are typically lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII-only, and stripped of stop words and punctuation. They matter for:

• Search engine optimization (SEO): descriptive slugs give search engines and readers a clue about page content.
• Stability of links: because slugs are usually editable independently of the headline, editors can rewrite a clickbait title without breaking inbound links.
• Internal referencing: APIs, sitemaps, and cross-links commonly key off the slug rather than a numeric ID.

For researchers and MUN delegates, the distinction matters when citing online sources: the slug is part of a URL's permanent structure, while query strings and tracking parameters are not. When a news organization changes a slug (sometimes called a "URL rewrite"), older citations may 404 unless a redirect is configured.

Newsroom slugs and web slugs occasionally diverge — a desk may use the internal slug ukraine-aid while the published URL reads senate-passes-ukraine-aid-package — but both descend from the same editorial impulse: give every story a short, memorable handle.