Here’s a little idea for creating innovation in news coverage: the 100 percent solution. It works like this: First, you set a goal to cover 100 percent 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 payoff, even if you don’t meet your goal.

Got it? Good. For that’s the whole idea.

In the rest of this post I will explain what I mean and why I think it can work. And I will give you some examples. Because the 100 percent solution is not an entirely new idea. It’s been tried. My aim is to get more of you to try it in some form.

So let’s start with a few imaginary cases

There’s going to be a wide open mayor’s race in Chicago because the incumbent, Democrat Richard M. Daley, is retiring. Rahm Emanuel is running and he will have plenty of competition. A big city mayoral election generates a lot of events: Candidates appear all over town. Unions and community groups have to decide whom to endorse. Speeches, debates, rallies, fundraisers in living rooms, backyard barbeques, meetings in church basements… Picture them all on a spreadsheet. Now tack that spreadsheet up on a wall.

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. That would be 100 percent coverage of campaign events.

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Discovering journalism in college saved me. At the time (1976) I was on a track that would have led to an assistant manager’s job at an Applebees. Seriously: I was a business management major at SUNY Buffalo, living at my mother’s house to save money, working nights and weekends at a banquet hall as a busboy, and without any passions other than playing pick-up basketball in four different gyms four nights a week, despite the fact that I wasn’t even good enough to make my high school team. I had no ambition because I didn’t know how to have an ambition. I wasn’t excited about learning and didn’t know what I was good at.

But then I walked into the college newspaper with a good story, and the editor who happened to be there, Brett Kline, said, “why don’t you write about it?” So I did. My piece was published, I got bitten by the journalism bug, and within six months I was special features editor of The Spectrum, then managing editor. In the spring of 1978 I was elected editor-in-chief for the following academic year. I was also a columnist. I rarely went to class. I was learning too much to stop and do that.

It was in the spring of 1977 that I decided that I wanted to become a professional journalist– a political reporter. Basically I wanted to be Johnny Apple, the legendary correspondent for the New York Times, who seemed to be on the front page every other morning. In those days the way you got to be a correspondent for the New York Times or the Washington Post was by 1.) rising in the hierarchy at your college newspaper, or going to a decent J-school; 2.) grabbing an internship at the biggest metro daily you could talk your way onto; 3.) doing well enough in the assignments you were given to get hired at that newspaper or a comparable one in your region; 4.) generating the “clips” (copies of your by-lined articles) that would allow you to jump in a year or two from Buffalo, Columbus, Birmingham or Norfolk to, say, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta or Baltimore; 5.) repeating step 4.) until you had the clips to get hired by the Post or the Times, which could take many years; and 6.) starting on the metro desk in New York or Washington until you got the call to report on the statehouse or the national scene.

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Originally published at my Posterous blog, Sep. 6, 2010.

Typically when people like me—a professor of journalism who is deeply involved in the digital world—advise people like you—students just starting their careers in journalism—we say to you things like:

You need to be blogging.

You need to understand search engines.

You need to know Flash and perhaps HTML5.

You need to grasp web metrics like Google analytics.

You need to know how to record audio or edit video

You need to “get” mobile. (“Mobile is going to be big!”)

And all of those things are true. They are all important. But I want to go in a completely different direction today. Ready? You need to understand that the way you imagine the users will determine how useful a journalist you will be.

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Today The Local East Village launches. That makes it a big day for me and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.

A daily news blog that covers the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan, The Local East Village—or LEV, as we call it—is a New York Times site produced in collaboration with NYU faculty and students. Some quick facts, and a caution:

Quick Facts

• The official urls for it are http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com and http://localeastvillage.com.

• On Twitter, it’s @nytlev. The Facebook page is here.

• For the background to this joint venture see my February post, Explaining The Local East Village, plus the various links at this page. I described how the LEV fits into where I think journalism education should be going in this MediaShift interview with Mark Glaser.

• The editor is Richard G. Jones , a former New York Times reporter, with oversight by Mary Ann Giordano, a Deputy Metropolitan Editor at the Times. They’re responsible for the content and the coverage.

• The Studio 20 program at NYU, which I direct, was intimately involved in the planning and conceptual stage, working closely with Jones and Giordano, as well as Jim Schachter, the Editor for Digital Initiatives and Associate Managing Editor of the Times, Jeremy Zilar, Blog Specialist for the Times, Brooke Kroeger, Director of the Carter Institute, Jason Samuels, my colleague on the Studio 20 faculty, and Yvonne Latty, who directs the Reporting New York program at NYU.

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I’m in Australia this week, where the country is in the midst of an election campaign that seems thoroughly uninspiring to almost everyone I’ve talked to. Several times I’ve been asked how campaign coverage might be improved. (See this television appearance on the ABC program Lateline.) I responded with the following sketch.

The Citizen’s Agenda in Campaign Coverage: Ten Steps to a Better Narrative (more…)

Wikileaks.org: Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010

Der Spiegel: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It

New York Times: The War Logs

The Guardian: The Afghanistan War Logs

From my internal notebook and Twitter feed, a few notes on this development:

1. Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ‘round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.

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