Solutions Journalism: What It Is and Is Not
Traditional journalists act as whistleblowers and expose wrongdoing, but pursue little beyond that regarding a story. David Bornstein, co-founder of The Solutions Journalism Network, sees journalism as “a feedback mechanism to help society self-correct,” but postulates that simply reporting a story is not enough. With the increasingly complex and challenging issues facing society, there is a need for traditional journalism to grow and become more accurate and complete by describing and capturing adaptive responses to entrenched social problems. Bornstein believes that just having individuals knowing about the problem is unlikely to generate corrective action and instead, “people need to know what they can do- and how” in order for people to become capable of shaping a better society.
Solutions journalism is not necessarily trying to evoke a specific response or trying to advocate for one specific side. It is not a “feel good” piece of journalism, a PR piece, or a story with a solution placed in as an afterthought at the end of the piece. The Solutions Journalism Network defines solutions journalism as “rigorous and compelling reporting on responses to social problems” and details how “the strongest solutions journalism stories use the rigor of investigative reporting to explore systemic, underlying reasons for social ills, and then critically examines efforts to address them.” It focuses on creating more knowledge and needs to be informative and transparent regarding how and why something does or does not work. It explains the merits of an idea or of an approach, the limitations and difficulties of the idea, as well as any barriers to implementation.
Solutions journalism has the potential to reframe problems in a way that initiates new thinking among policymakers, practitioners and community members. Journalist Rhiannon Meyers wrote “Cost of Diabetes” in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, and described her solutions-oriented stories as the ones that “sparked the most conversation here about what we can do differently and what we are not doing now.”
It is largely thought that solutions journalism improves reader engagement and increases the probability of a reader sharing the story. This is corroborated in the findings of “Engaging Communities Through Solutions Journalism,” by Andrea Wenzel, Daniela Gerson and Evelyn Moreno. Their focus group participants explained they would be more likely to seek out news and share stories if solutions journalism were more common and many noted that the sample stories in the study helped them envision a way to become personally involved in community problem solving.
Wenzel, Gerson, and Moreno explain how limited empirical research has been conducted on how audiences respond to solutions journalism, however, there still remains a deficit regarding research about how solutions journalism can be applied at the level of local and ethnic media. This is important and necessary to rectify because at this level, community members know and learn more about issues that affect them the most. These same individuals also have the greatest chance of affecting change by implementing possible solutions.
