A hundred percent is no solution

This has to be the daftest thing I've read for a long time.

It's the latest posting at NY journalism guru Jay Rosen's newly refurbished PressThink blog.

It's called the 100% solution and the opener captures the idea:

"It starts with a vision: what if we could cover all of it? When you try to act on that vision, you invariably run into problems. And it's sweating those problems that leads to innovation, or at least to new knowledge."

I'll explain why it's a daft idea in a moment - but first, just to be clear, I respect Jay Rosen and his (written) work hugely.

I was inspired by his thoughts on Public Journalism at the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos - inspired enough to put some of those ideas into practice at Today. You can read how those experiments went here.

And I interviewed him - disappointingly, as it turned out - for a radio programme I made a couple of years ago on responsible journalism.

So why the callous dismissal of his latest idea?

Information Asymmetry

Three big reasons. The biggest: that the proposition that journalism is about covering 100% of anything is as misguided as it is misleading.

Sure, we're all slogging through this existential/financial crisis (what is news? and how do we pay for it?) and coming to many different solutions in many different places. And, sure, I'll be accused of being a reluctant migrant unable or unwilling to let go of the old certainties of a lost homeland.

But there are important reasons why journalism isn't, shouldn't, couldn't and can't be about 100% of anything.

It's precisely because journalism (by usage and convention ... and, yes, I know) has no requirement to be 100% of anything that it can perform its most important function: addressing, in part at least, the information asymmetry between power and citizen.

Think about it: if the requirement on journalism were - as it is on the courts or public tribunals and inquiries - to get to 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth', then the whole business of investigative journalism would become impossible.

By usage and custom and civic usefulness, and without ever saying so out loud, we citizens have tasked journalism with giving us timely snapshots of greater truths without the burden of (necessarily) capturing 100% of that greater truth. Bluntly, journalism stops when we citizens know enough - insert here a definition of 'enough'; it will be different in different places.

Of course, the information business doesn't stop there. Clerking, archiving and history take over. But they are not the same as journalism and we need to be wary of fuzzing the boundaries.

Timeliness

Second: for all the transformations, innovations and migrations, 'news' and journalism remain a (tiny, tiny, tiny) subset of the information universe defined by (inter alia) timeliness.

Now we can argue about what timeliness means and whether it's a journalist- or citizen-defined concept. We can argue, too - and I have elsewhere - that 'timeliness' is an increasingly limited definer of 'news' or journalism more broadly. Worse, that the 'timeliness' constraint has caused journalism to generate forms and conventions that inhibit its audiences' understanding of the world around us/them.

But it's not entirely irrelevant ... unless you advocate journalism as archive. There are good reasons why some journalism at some points in the information cycle can and should behave like archive ('if it's new to me it's news, irrespective of when I hear it'). But there are better reasons why it shouldn't - the competition for attention being only one.

Is it really 100%

Third: while Jay Rosen's examples - both real and imagined - deliver what looks a bit like 100%, they're nothing of the sort. Take his notional mayoral race in Chicago:

"What if we tried to cover every event, big and small, involving every candidate who had a legitimate chance to be the next mayor, but also all the events where the candidates themselves may be missing but the campaign is somehow alive and present in the space between Chicagoans."

Would that be 100%? You only have to stop a moment to consider the internal differences that would be inevitable in that 'coverage'.

Which individual element is full? Which is sketchy? Which is covered by an antagonistic voice in the ecosystem? Which by a friendly one? Where do you stop in any element? And so on - exactly the questions BBC journalists have to ask themselves in covering any political contest.

It's not 100% in any meaningful sense.

Concessions

I accept that the '100% solution' is no more than "a little idea for creating innovation in news coverage" and that it's not proposed as an "always and everywhere solution". A muted hurrah for anything that squeezes journalists towards independent, original thought.

But here's the thing: by focusing on an idea as fundamentally unjournalistic, fundamentally archivistic as covering 100% of anything (even specialist outlets don't do or claim to do that), the idea encourages independent, original thought down unjournalistic paths.

It's precisely because journalism - even migrated journalism - isn't about 100% of anything that we can focus original thinking on the next snapshot of the greater truth. On ways of liberating the next bit of information that's significant, relevant and of civic use. On ways of making what we know make sense and ways of thinking what the next step might be.

Without fretting too much about how to get to 100%.