Stages of Found Poetry: Below The Line (digital)

·         Prior to an event:

o   An editor or commissioning editor sees news value in an event

o   They select a reporter to cover it, based on reporter skills and knowledge of house style and/or political leanings of the publication

o   A deadline, wordcount and brief is given to the reporter

·         An event occurs

·         A reporter witnesses the event

·         The reporter writes about the event and submits the piece by deadline to the brief as above

·         A sub editor cleans copy for grammar, accuracy to house style as above, and selects a headline

o   To increase clickthroughs online

o   To draw readers to that article

o   To enable the advertising department to maximise views in order to sell ad space near the article at a higher rate

·         The editor may also go through the subbing process before putting the article live online

·         Comments are opened

·         Commenters offer their views

o   They will have had to sign up to the service either because a) they share the aims, bias and leanings of the publication, or b) they have strong views on the event and want to share them. It is not relevant if they are positive or negative

·         Comments enable more clickthroughs on an article as above re. ad space

·         The would-be poet searches through the comments to select suitable content

o   Based on rhyme, metre, pace, wording

o   Based on suitable content – either oppositional in nature or themed for the purposes of the piece

·         These comments are rearranged / decontexted / recontexted into recognisable ‘poetic’ forms

·         The poet-editor selects the format and writes a suitable headline

·         The poem/s are published on a website which may be itself subjected to the advertising metrics as above

·         News of the poems’ existence are published on social media, emails, and other forms of dissemination

·         Comments are published on the poems. These comments are subject to the same process of poetic selection/editing as above.

These circularities seek to reveal the bias at every stage, including that of the poet-editor, whose ostensibly neutral position is found to be nothing of the sort due to the extraction choices and poem-edit-creation above. The Internet’s structure is also revealed through these choices, specifically some of the relationship with advertising, funding, content and click counts, social media and self-selecting subsets of political-social groups, anonymity and accountability, et cetera.