Can Solutions Journalism Help Fight Poverty?

If asked, what would you say is one of the most important issues affecting your community? What would you want to discuss? Would you want to talk about minimum wage, gentrification, or the lack of jobs in the area? Would you pick another topic? What do you think your friends or family would say?

Denizens of Philadelphia were asked this exact question and one of their most popular replies? Poverty.

Sandra Shea, Daily News Staff Writer, described how with support from Temple University’s Center for Public Interest Journalism, a citywide survey was commissioned from the Insight and Survey Center. Based upon the results, Philadelphians answered that poverty is one of the most important issues that must be addressed for the city to move forward.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, through the Philadelphia Research Initiative, conducted a report called Philadelphia’s Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed. It found that at 25.7 percent, Philadelphia’s poverty rate is the highest among the nation’s 10 largest cities. About 400,000 residents, including about 37 percent of the city’s children under the age of 18 live below the federal poverty line. Nearly half of all poor residents are in deep poverty, defined as 50 percent below the federal poverty line.

While there are many challenges associated with covering poverty and economic inequality, one of the main challenges comes from the idea that each city, area, or individual affected by poverty has unique circumstances. Each has a different idea of what constitutes poverty and has a different idea of how to “fix” it. For example, according to the survey from the Insight and Survey Center, nearly 70 percent of those surveyed believe that a solution to poverty is increasing the minimum wage and nearly 60 percent believe that another solution is to increase government-sponsored job-training programs.

There is no one solution to alleviate poverty; however, there are many ideas, potential, and partial solutions that solutions journalism can investigate, research and write about to begin addressing this far-reaching issue.

The Solutions Journalism Network, created in 2013, defines solutions journalism as “rigorous and compelling reporting on responses to social problems.”

Authors of the Solutions Journalism Toolkit, Martin and Sarika Bansal, explain the value of solutions journalism when they say, “People must learn about credible examples of responses to problems in order to become empowered, discerning actors capable of shaping a better society.” They explain how the impact journalists are trying to have is “magnified if alongside the problems, we report on how people are trying to solve them.”

The report by the Philadelphia Research Initiative stated that the goal of their analysis is to “inform the conversation for local policymakers and for all who care about Philadelphia and its future” which is where solutions journalism comes into play.

For example, a year-long series in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times called “Cost of Diabetes” had three-solutions-oriented stories. According to its author, Rhiannon Meyers, they helped spark conversations “here about what we can do differently and what we are not doing now.”

Regarding the complex issue of poverty, solutions journalism can do something similar. Coverage of these issues in the Philadelphia region, from a solutions journalism framework, has the potential to be extremely useful, but the topic would need to be strategically covered.

Solutions journalists would need to go to the areas most affected by poverty, like the areas outlined in the Philadelphia Research Initiative, and directly speak with the residents to identify what they believe is the cause as well as what they believe are potential solutions. Solutions journalists would then need to research and look for instances where the potential solutions have worked in this area or in other areas at alleviating poverty to write about in their piece. However, all journalists must remember that they are writing about human beings; their lives, their hardships and potentially their struggles, so it is important to frame the situation and them correctly.

The last step of solutions journalism, according to the Solutions Journalism Toolkit, is to engage readers in the piece once it is finished, and to do this, one must portray and frame the situation respectfully and factually. While technically everyone can be the audience for a published piece, it is likely the people who are most affected and who contributed to the story who will be the main audience, and so it is necessary to cultivate a relationship to continue to learn about the issues they are facing surrounding poverty, in order to continue to report on potential solutions.