By: Anna Crane The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., is letting readers express their dismay or pleasure with 2006 news coverage in its third annual Holiday Haiku Fest.
Until December 15, Courier-Journal readers are invited to submit their takes on the news of the past year in the form of a little poem called a Haiku -- three lines with five syllables in the first, seven in the second, and five in the third.
Top entries will be printed in the Christmas Eve edition of the paper (there were approximately 100 printed last year) and the paper's Web site will post as many of the remainders as possible, as well as videos of entrants reciting or performing their Haiku.
Topics can be anything that happened in 2006, from local to national to international news. Some entries have even been about personal events, says Pam Platt, public editor of the Courier-Journal and coordinator/founder of its Haiku fest.
"Last year, a lot of people wrote about the war, and there were people on all sides of this issue," says Platt. "Some of them wrote about the story about how nobody could take pictures of the flag draped coffins coming back from Iraq."
The paper also encourages entries that comment on the media and news coverage, and readers don't hold back, says Platt. One Haiku from 2005 said that the 24-hour news cycle just "fills the air with hype."
Platt recites another from 2005 on a reader's perspective on newspapers: "I grab the front page / Anticipating good news / Blood and gore with tea."
She also says that a large amount of entries from 2005 were about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, and she's interested to see how many do the same this year.
Platt started the Holiday Haiku Fest at the Courier-Journal after she did something similar at Florida Today, based in Melbourne, Fla, when the Mir Space Station was preparing to exit its orbit.
While a lot of newspapers have interactive reader features, says Platt, a Haiku Fest is "a creative way to engage their readers who really do care about the news and like to express themselves." It's also a fitting format and allows many people to be printed in a short amount of space, she says.
"You have to fight for every syllable in a Haiku," she says. "I don't want to necessarily equate it to headline writing, but you have to take dense or complicated material and reduce it to get its essence. Haiku is poetry too, which maybe speaks more to truth."
Since she began the Haiku Fest, Platt says it's one of the things she looks forward to the most each year, and she's starting to notice that readers look forward to it too. Platt says she received a letter from a reader in October making sure that she was holding the Haiku Fest in 2006, because he had already started working on his entries.
"This is like my Christmas present to the readers," she says. "I let them read themselves rather than me."
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