From Passive Recipients to Active Participants: How Engaged Journalism Fosters Change

Lou Brancaccio, journalist and editor emeritus of the Vancouver Columbian explains how he, “used to believe that people in the newsroom should keep their distance from the community.” However, his stance on this issue is evolving as journalism changes due to new technologies and media channels that allow for increased participation and engagement between the public and journalists.

Traditional journalism focuses on disseminating information to an audience and is not concerned with identifying potential solutions to the problem being reported on. The audience of traditional journalism is seen as “an active recipient of the news rather than as an active participant in the news” and are kept at arm’s length from journalist’s and their work. Now, the line separating the audience and professional news media has blurred. This is seen as positive by proponents of an engaged approach to journalism. As discussed in class, one approach that complements engaged journalism is solutions journalism.

The Solutions Journalism Network, created in 2013, defines solutions journalism as “rigorous and compelling reporting on responses to social problems” and David Bornstein, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, believes that “people need to know what they can do-and how” in order for them to become capable of shaping a better society. Solutions journalism offers them this opportunity.

Advocates of solutions journalism believe solutions stories “offer a pathway to engaging audiences” and a report based on a quasi-experiment conducted by the Solutions Journalism Network and the Engaging News Project corroborated this belief. It found that “solutions-based reporting may be an effective journalistic tool that services the needs of both audiences and news organizations and that it has the potential to increase reader engagement.”

With solutions-based journalism, the audience is no longer a passive receiver of information. The report found that readers of solutions stories were more likely than readers of non-solutions stories to indicate a desire to become involved in working toward a solution to the issue and were more likely to state they felt more informed about the issue. Readers of solutions stories formed a deeper connection to the issues, had an increased desire to read more articles on the topic and looked for more solutions-focused articles, thus demonstrating increased engagement.

When combined with engaged journalism, solutions journalism had a significant impact in 2016 and demonstrated how increased engagement from journalism projects has the potential to create change in a community. For example, the Seattle Times’ covered school discipline as part of their solutions-oriented series, “Education Lab” and one of the topics covered discussed racial inequities in school suspension and expulsion policies.

Sharon Chan, vice president of innovation, product, and development at the Seattle Times, explains how instead of writing the stories in a traditional way, they “went out and covered promising approaches, and then we had two events: One was a solutions workshop with 40 stakeholders, and then we had a town hall with about 200 people. Both of those [events] heavily featured the voices of educators themselves, students themselves, principals themselves, as opposed to us getting up on stage and talking.”

This coverage is thought to have increased pressure on the legislature, which passed a bill in 2016 to improve education for minority students. Representative Lillian Ortiz-Self stated that “the extensive reporting on school discipline and its damaging effects, recently published in The Seattle Times” made a key difference. She also told the Times that “This had been hovering for a while, but after your story ran we had more outcry from parents than ever before.”

Engaged journalism projects often incorporate input from the audience of the story or the audience itself in some way, which as the above example demonstrates, has the potential to create change. However, additional research is still needed to analyze how audiences respond to solutions journalism, as well as further research on how solutions journalism can be applied at the level of local and ethnic media because at these levels, community members are more apt to know, learn more about and affect greater change on issues that involve them and their communities.