Categories: OLD Media Moves

Biz journalism as haiku in the FT

Sonali Prasad of the Poynter Institute writes about how a computer algorithm is creating haikus out of Financial Times stories.

Prasad writes, “Chris Gathercole, head of FT Labs at the Financial Times, was learning a new coding language, GoLang, when an idea struck him: Why not create poetry out of news stories?

“He developed a program that parses an article for text and pieces together fragments that can be hand-picked to form a Haiku, an ancient form of Japanese poetry. Haikus follow a set pattern — typically a three-line observation with 17 syllables arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern.

“The ‘accidental’ poems are now published in the FT as part of a column called Hidden Haiku.

“‘I love that these snippets are just sitting in plain sight but unrecognized in the FT articles,’ Gathercole told Poynter in a video call. ‘You can tell when a journalist has written a piece and really enjoyed the words.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.