Service Journalism and Solutions Journalism: You can do both (and your audiences will thank you)
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Service journalism and solutions journalism are both essential tools to make your reporting stronger and more useful to your audiences. Both tools can help grow your audience and revenue. While others have explained these approaches better than I can (solutions journalism, service journalism), I will focus on what these journalistic tools can do for communities.
One hurdle that many newsrooms encounter when attempting to adopt solutions journalism as a practice is mistaking solutions journalism for service journalism, and vice versa. So, I’ve attempted to solve this with a flow chart and this explainer.
Here are the definitions of each:
- Service journalism is giving our audiences good, practical advice to make their lives easier.
- Solutions journalism is rigorous, evidence-based reporting on responses to social problems.
Generally, service journalism attempts to solve a problem for an individual or family. Solutions journalism is reporting that looks at how well (or not so well) a response to a systemic problem is actually making things better. Think of them as the micro and the macro of journalistic problem solving.
But first, engagement…
Before we go deeper, it is critical for all journalism to be informed by our audiences. Let’s bury the mindset that journalists simply tell communities what is important and replace it with a commitment to learn from them and give them the journalism they ask us for. Not every conversation must be aired or published, especially when we are starting outreach in communities we have otherwise neglected in the past.
My former colleagues at KPCC/LAist have a lot of tips about how to use engagement for your reporting. Mariana Dale explains here how she built her early childhood education beat with an engaged approach. David Rodriguez used another approach to investigate what audiences needed to know to better understand the decennial census.
Service journalism comes from engagement.
When you engage with your community in a meaningful, non-extractive way, you will get tons of story ideas, requests, and better sources. Most importantly, it will lead to stories and products that your audiences actually need.
A lot of service journalism is explanatory. It explains how things, like voting or higher education, work or where to get certain important services, like a COVID-19 vaccination or an internet connection during a global pandemic.
Many newsrooms have learned that details about how to get support during the pandemic were not available in commonly spoken languages in their communities. The Sahan Journal created a series in multiple languages about the COVID-19 vaccine. New Hampshire Public Radio created a tool to meet that need — a daily Spanish-language newscast that’s delivered over Whatsapp.
If this type of work is not something your newsroom regularly produces, you’ll have to make sure there’s a mechanism to get it into the hands of the people who need it most. Newsrooms are texting, using WhatsApp, even the mail, and here are a few more ideas.
It’s time to jump into solutions journalism.
Many of the examples above come from the pandemic. It was a critical and urgent time to get information to people fast. Our audiences had problems and many newsrooms made sure they provided information to connect them to the services to solve those problems. But did those solutions work on a macro level? The answer to this question is solutions journalism, my friends.
Our work is not finished once we provide the information. As journalists, we must see if the services are working or not, how well, and for whom. That deep, evidence-based reporting could lead to solutions journalism.
Is there a hospital in your city that has fixed their hospital bed shortage? Or maybe doing a better job of training family-members to care for sick loved-ones at home? Or maybe they significantly cut their rate of hospital-acquired infections? This is vital news.
What makes solutions journalism rigorous and evidence-based is the method. Every solutions journalism story includes these four pillars:
- The response and how it works. This answers the question, “How are they working to make it better (in detail)?”
- Evidence of impact (qualitative and/or quantitative). It’s about evidence, not intentions. This answers the question, “How do we know it’s working?”
- Insights. This answers the questions, “What are the lessons learned while working on the response? What’s the important context?”
- Limitations to the response. This answers the questions, “What is not addressed? Or what’s missing?”
Yes. Please mix service journalism and solutions journalism.
Service journalism and solutions journalism may be different, but they pair like wine and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, rice and beans, fufu and stew. You can do them in a series, as part of a beat, or in the same article.
Fabrice Le Lous, a journalist for La Nación and Latin America Consultant for the Solutions Journalism Network, is particularly talented at mixing service journalism and solutions journalism, for example in this piece he authored in June of 2020. For those of you who don’t read Spanish, the story is an explainer that details the way rainwater collection works, complete with diagrams. Taking the work a step further, Le Lous includes examples of how it’s working in a school and multiple businesses, each example includes all four solutions journalism pillars.
El Tímpano, a community-centered Spanish-language news outlet based in Oakland, California, is also doing this type of work. The organization bases its work in the Mayan and Latino communities in the Bay Area. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve joined hundreds of Spanish-speakers receiving regular text updates with information about where to get tested for COVID, get a meal, or educational services. Now, El Tímpano has launched a new outlet and is working with the Solutions Journalism Network as part of the Health Equity Initiative.
Journalists around the world continue to experiment with the tools of engagement, service, and solutions journalism. As we do, we will continue to learn more about how to refine and perfect these tools. What’s certain is that journalism is strongest when it centers the needs of our audiences and that is the goal of all of these journalistic tools.
After a decade in public media newsrooms, Michelle coaches newsrooms in solutions journalism and issues of equity, inclusion, belonging and diversity. They are a 2023 JSK Fellow at Stanford University focusing on building cultures of belonging for all journalists in the news industry.
