bojo:
There’s a little meme, fired up mostly by Jay Rosen, about something called “the 100% solution” for journalism. That is, taking a subject and covering everything about it (Rosen’s example is a network of organisations and volunteers covering every single event in the upcoming Chicago mayoral elections).
This idea of total reporting has built a head of steam, both the glowing — Paul Bradshaw calls it “a wonderful framework” — and the… well, the not so glowing; the BBC’s Kevin Marsh says “it’s the daftest thing I’ve read for a long time”.
It’s clear that there’s great value to covering the undercovered, and a lot of empty spaces in civic journalism that the web — sometimes — can fill. Networked journalism can play a fantastic role here, becoming a sort of ad hoc news agency for a niche subject: just imagine if a group of people, otherwise disconnected, get together to make sure that every local council meeting or every school sports game is attended by somebody. That’s got to be in the public good.
I’m a little baffled, however, as to why we should give ourselves over to mathematical supremacy here. Should 100% — the idea of completeness — be the defining point in this process? And in fact, it surprises me a little that Rosen is getting behind something that (to me, at least) feels disconnected from his usual logic. I’m going to try to explain why.
Partially I’m concerned about this gaining traction because the prime example of it happening in real life is AOL and its Seed site. They tried out a fun-but-ultimately-doomed attempt to interview every single band performing at SXSW this year. There were 2,000 bands.
But AOL wasn’t just covering SXSW for the sake of it. It was a major sponsor. This turned the scheme into a gigantic circle jerk: the company stood to benefit if it inflated the event’s importance as much as possible. A stunt would get the network and the festival lots of attention. In particular, it was a stunt for Seed, the network’s low-paying assignment system that is built to generate copy for AOL’s sites. Everybody benefitted.
Or did they? AOL got at least some of what it wanted, but how many people read all of those 2,000 interviews? Or even more than a handful? How many good stories got swamped by the sheer volume of copy? How well were the subjects — the bands, the music fans, the festival goers — served by the project?
In an attempt to democratise and broaden coverage, I worry that the 100% solution actually hands over the reins to the worst instincts of editors in the same way that the hunt for pageviews can damage good journalism. I worry that it encourages a sort of journalistic presenteeism.
And more particularly, I worry that it gives people a very easy way to refrain from making important and necessary judgments. It almost feels like an endorsement of the view-from-nowhere. Handing yourself over to 100% reporting potentially gives equal importance to every event; it encourages the horrible he-said-she-said reporting that steps back from telling it like it is: the sort of reporting that refuses to call torture by its real name. In its worst form, it could be a form of charlatan journalism that arrives with promises to provide context, but instead strips it away. And goodness knows there’s enough charlatan journalism already.
The truth is that while of course you want to have eyes and ears everywhere, reporting everything is probably not as important as covering what matters. How you decide what matters is a different question, I think. And, obviously, your mileage may vary. In lots of situations, it’s better to have something than nothing. Certain niches, certain projects, would really benefit from such a call-to-arms.
But in Big Media at least, it’s an idea that could exacerbate what’s already problematic. Deciding what’s important is difficult, and contentious, and often controversial. But that doesn’t mean doing it is wrong. The media already gives too much emphasis to fringe groups, extremists or anyone who can offer “the other side”. Doesn’t 100% reporting allow the weak or the cowardly or the simply ignorant the chance to let important information to disappear into the morass, or give more prominence to those who understand how to work the press machine?
Look, I’m in favour of targets. They can work. But I can’t stop thinking that if you stand for everything, then you’re going to find it difficult to ever stand for something.
