Journalism innovation: try the 100% solution

The College of Journalism is running its second Student Innovation Award. Entries are invited before 30 September. Full details are here. This blog, an edited version of a piece by Jay Rosen first published as a blog in 2011, encourages the spirit of journalistic innovation:

Here’s a little idea for creating innovation in news coverage: the 100% solution. It works like this: first, you set a goal to cover 100% of… well, of something. In trying to reach the goal you immediately run into problems. To solve those problems you often have to improvise or innovate. And that’s the pay-off, even if you don’t meet your goal. Got it? Good. For that’s the whole idea. In the rest of this piece I will give a couple of examples and explain why I think it can work. My aim is to get more of you to try it in some form.

In March 2010, AOL attempted to interview all 2,000 bands appearing at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin. Saul Hansell, the director of AOL’s Seed.com, a network of freelance writers (which closed in 2012), explained it this way in a blog post aimed at potential contributors: “We’re asking Seed contributors not simply to regurgitate what they can find searching the web but to get on the phone, get out into the world, ask questions, witness events and write what they’ve discovered.

“…For SXSW, we are only asking one writer to profile each band. To make this work, we are using email for part of the process… Like everything we’re doing now at Seed, this is very much an experiment. We don’t know how these interviews will turn out. But I’m betting they will be as lively and varied as the SXSW festival itself.”

Right there you can see what I mean by “…In trying to reach the goal you immediately run into problems. To solve those problems you often have to improvise or innovate.” Seed.com didn’t have the systems in place to handle that many contributors on one project. So it had to do it by email. But what a great way to get a handle on the system you need to build. The spec sheet practically writes itself. Of course there were problems. I asked Hansell what the goals of the experiment were: “One main point of our project was to focus on human reporting - in this case telephone interviews with the nearly 2,000 bands that play the show… In many cases these were the first interviews with these bands ever by a national outlet. We also created enough stress on the system to diagnose many weaknesses we’ve worked to fix.

“In the end, we did phone interviews with well over half the bands. Some wouldn’t call us back. In a few cases there were language problems or reporters who were unreliable. I’ve said it was a PR mistake to say we would interview all 2,000 bands rather than try to interview them. But in my mind that’s a footnote.”

It isn’t always possible to achieve 100% coverage of something. And I’m not recommending it as an ‘always and everywhere’ solution. Just a neat little idea that can sometimes spark innovation.

Here’s another example. I’m on the advisory board of a newspaper chain, Journal-Register Company (JRC). John Paton, the CEO, agreed to create an IdeaLab for employees who wanted to experiment with new ways of covering the news. If selected they would get 25% of their time to work on their ideas. I urged members of the IdeaLab to try the 100% solution and two of them took me up on it.

Chris Stanley, online editor for the Reporterin Lansdale, Pennsylvania, tried it with high school sports. JRC has a number of papers in the suburban Philadelphia area but they had rarely worked together. “We wanted to get coverage and scores from not just the high schools in our area but all the schools in PIAA District 1 [the state high school sports governing organisation that covers much of the Philadelphia region]. Since we have news organisations in these areas that cover these schools, we needed to find a way to integrate their coverage and live score reporting with our own. Some games were double and triple-covered; others got no coverage at all. Scores did not appear on the websites until late at night, if at all.

“For live score coverage of Friday night games we turned to Twitter. Reporters, photographers, editors, readers, fans, whoever is at a game, can send us tweets via @phillyscores. We promote this online and in the print product. Some editors were concerned about spamming or kids trashing rival teams with this account, so we compromised with a system of retweeting scores.

“One of the benefits of the project was to get the sports departments of the various newspapers in Journal-Register on to the same page. We can’t be afraid to recognise good information wherever it comes from. The next step will be to integrate all these elements - complete coverage of ALL district games - into a package that will be the ultimate source of information for football [and other sports, as well] in the region. Plans for such a site are in the works on a company-wide level.”

So that’s the 100% solution. The point of trying it is to jump right into the middle of the innovation puzzle. But there is another point which I haven’t mentioned. In a time of contraction in the news industry, and of diminished expectations in the workaday world of professional journalism, we need counter-cyclical measures that broaden our ambitions, widen the lens and insist that with new tools and greater participation - what Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, calls the mutualisation of journalism - we can do way more than we were ever able to do before.

This is an edited version of a chapter by Jay Rosen in What Do We Mean by Local? published this year by Abramis Academic Publishing and edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble with Neil Fowler.