The thing that defines all medium (aside from the web) is its form factor. The main reasons we need to make editorial decisions in the media (other than spellchecking, fact-checking, and general stylistic issues) is because we've got limited space/time — the “news hole” has a finite depth.

Absolute objectivism in media is impossible to begin with, as Howard Zinn has said–simply because the act of reporting the facts requires one person to determine what the facts are. Add to that the distortion caused when that reportage is forced into the form of the medium that will deliver it, and the words and images are taken a step further from the truth, with value attached to them by editors who determine their placement within the medium (front page or B-23, top of the hour or morning show filler). And by that time, to paraphrase Pete Seeger, “words , words, words…how much truth remains?”

That's sort of what led me to start my nearly-daily ritual of headline haiku–it's a way for me to filter the filter of media by making the message conform to an form that's as arbitrary and ritualistic as that of traditional media. Taking a news story down to haiku length and format, down to seventeen syllables, requires all the crap be filtered out.

I've now put Headline Haiku (24/7 5/7/5) on its own page, in the hopes of making it a community effort. Send me your haiku by email and I'll post them, or you can post them in comments. Make them about your own headlines, too–what you see and experience personally. Maybe someday, we'll get our own cable news network.