This CSM article has the text “this is a peg boxthis is a peg boxthis is a pegboxthis is a peg boxthis is a peg boxthis is a peg boxthis is a peg box” under the headline and above the byline.
Probably an oversight that it was not replaced with appropriate text.
Anyway, I can kind of grasp from the context what the term must mean: a brief highlight of the story below. But maybe that’s an oversimplification. In any case, I’d never heard of this before.
So, in short, what is a peg box?
It’s where the strings tie to pegs on a musical instrument. That’s the only use I know of.
Well, I’m in magazine publishing and have never heard of that before. We normally call that section of the article the “deck” (or “dek”, since misspelling those sorts of words–dek, lede, hed, subhed–is added insurance vs. accidentally putting an editor’s scribbled notes into the final copy) or the “subhead.”
Perhaps some folks (and it could very well be different for newspaper folks … they’re a crazy, parochial sort, with their own traditions) use “peg box” as the shorthand for this section, since it’s up by itself at the top of the article–much like the peg box on a stringed instrument is up by itself at the end of the neck, away from the main body of the instrument.