Q&A with Keith Hammonds, President, Solutions Journalism Network
This week, The Idea caught up with Keith to learn about his path to solutions journalism, the business case for it, and how SJN is supporting the increased need from news organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
Tell me about your path to Solutions Journalism Network and what your role is there.
I have been a journalist most of my life, focused primarily on business news. The heart of my work was at Businessweek magazine and then Fast Company. In 2007, I left Fast Company to go to Ashoka, which is a global nonprofit organization that catalyzes and supports social entrepreneurship. I joined Ashoka to start a program focused on supporting social entrepreneurs in the news and knowledge space.
That experience focused me in two meaningful ways. First, I became very concerned with what happens at the intersection of news and citizenship — what we now call engagement. Secondly, I came to know David Bornstein, who was one of the cofounders of Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). He and Tina Rosenberg had started writing The Fixes column for the New York Times in 2011 or so. The original idea for SJN spun out of that column. As he, Tina, and Courtney Martin started to think what an organization could look like, I got pulled into the conversation, to the moment when we launched in 2013.
Where does your personal interest in solutions journalism come from?
A lot of business journalism turns out to be solutions-focused. If you look at publications like Bloomberg Businessweek or Fortune, a lot of what they write is focused on strategies for success: What are the best ways to market your product? What are the best ways to manage people?
As David Bornstein has said, there is not a company called Fast Bankruptcy that is focused on failure. In a way, that solutions focus is built into the DNA of business reporting. As a business journalist, that skillset came pretty easily.
Also as a matter of orientation, around the time SJN was being formed, I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the relentless focus in news coverage on what was wrong, what’s broken, what’s corrupt, to the exclusion mostly of attempts to correct what’s wrong.
My approach at Ashoka, which is this amazing global community of probably solvers, exposed me not just to the inherent optimism of entrepreneurs who believe that big systemic problems can be fixed, but the reality that a lot of those problems are being fixed and that those fixes were attached to real world strategies, tactics, and mechanics that take the mystery out of problem solving and make it very real and very accessible. At the time, in 2012–2013, I was looking at the same divide that David, Tina, and Courtney were and seeing this profound gap between the news as it was being reported about how broken the world is and the reality in the Ashoka universe.
How has SJN changed over the last couple years, both in terms of its scale and in terms of what you’ve learned and changed about your approach along the way?
Solutions journalism and practice has been in journalism for a long time — just not called solution journalism, and not in a very prominent way. A big part of our work the first few years was about naming this practice as a thing and about gaining credibility for this idea that reporting on solutions using the same professional tool set that we applied to critical reporting is not just legitimate, but actually really powerful.
I would say that on the whole, at least in the United States, we’re winning the battle. Far fewer of our conversations these days are, “Here’s this thing called solutions journalism and here’s why you should do it,” because many journalists now have heard of solutions journalism and understand the rationale. I would say the exception to that is in commercial television, where until the last year, we’ve not had as much exposure. In commercial TV, there’s not the same sense of urgency about shifting coverage because the business model has not yet degraded in the way that it has for print and certain public media
The challenge for us has shifted from establishing that different frame for journalists to actually shifting practices itself, such that solutions journalism moves from being an anecdotal once-every-so-often story that complements coverage to being baked into the heart of coverage in a sustained and sustainable way.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted SJN’s work?
The carnage in the news business right now is real, tragic, and intense; we’ve had many, many calls with newsroom leaders who are making painful decisions about what to cut. On the other hand, this also is a moment that’s exposing the profound need in journalism to shift gears. We’ve talked with a lot of journalists and newsroom leaders who recognize that solutions reporting has to be part of the way they cover COVID-19 for their communities, and they’re wrestling with how to make that happen.
So, we’ve been working to support that. We’ve produced webinars on applying the solutions lens to COVID coverage (in English and Spanish) and how to do solutions reporting from home. We’ve collected and tagged COVID-19 solutions stories in a dedicated section of our Story Tracker — there are 328 as of now. We’ve curated dozens of story collections on various COVID-19 topics. We’ve put together a database of databases that report COVID-19 cases and deaths disaggregated by race and ethnicity. We also have posts on assessing COVID solutions stories; 24 questions to frame your COVID reporting; how three newsroom collaboratives are pursuing COVID coverage; and more.
We’ve allocated a modest pot of funding to support COVID-19 solutions reporting from our existing partner network and are also looking to fund projects by diverse-led news organizations. Much of this support, based on what we’ve heard, probably will go to freelance reporters or editors to temporarily expand capacity. We’ve made sub-grants to seven newsrooms from this fund so far.
Finally, we’re testing a new product: a story exchange that will allow newsrooms to easily share and republish stories about coronavirus responses — getting solutions stories to new audiences across the nation.
How do you pitch solutions journalism to publishers from a business perspective?
It’s one thing to say that bringing solutions reporting into your mix can produce higher quality journalism by providing communities with a more complete picture of the world. We think that’s true, but that has to be attached to a business calculus.
So, when we talk to editors and to owners, we typically talk about changes in engagement that results from solutions reporting. Independent researchers have looked at, for example, A/B story testing and compared how audiences engage with problem-based stories and with comparable solutions-focused stories. The results vary, but what’s consistent is that time spent with stories tends to increase by quite a lot. In many cases, social shares also go up, and in some cases, traffic goes up as well.
We start with that, but we also talk about the change that solutions reporting can have on engagement activities, especially community engagement activities. Solutions reporting tends to inform more constructive public discourse, whether it’s on online forums or in-person town meetings. If those discussions are anchored in solutions reporting in addition to reporting on the problem, conversation tends to shift away from a black-and-white blame game to a focus instead on the available responses.
When you start to generate that sort of discussion, it tends to reflect back on the trust that audiences attach to news organizations. The big question is how higher engagement and higher levels of trust can translate into higher revenue. We’ve seen anecdotal evidence that that’s happening, like with The Seattle Times, which was one of our first newsroom relationships. They started solutions reporting with this initiative called Education Lab focused on coverage of public schools. It’s still going on six years later, and they used that as the basis for two newer labs focused on homelessness and transportation respectively, both of which have a strong solutions focus and both of which had been funded discretely by a foundation and corporate sponsors in part because of the appeal of the solution focus.
News organizations like the Richland Source, which is a smaller online outlet, have done concerted sponsorship campaigns to fund all solutions reporting costs across the news organization. Last year, it raised $60,000+ in a month. This year, they’re already doing a sponsorship drive that has raised more than six figures.
Anecdotal evidence is cool and powerful, but we need to understand the impact in a more systematic way. Last year, we got a grant from Google News to launch a more coherent initiative around this. We have selected 13 news organizations under financial duress in communities, both rural and urban. With each of those 13, we are supporting an experiment attached to solutions reporting and audience and community engagement activities to see if we can describe more concretely and measure the effect that those editorial and engagement strategies have on new revenue. The experiments will play out over the course of this year and we hope to learn a lot from that about the relationship between solutions reporting and revenue that we can then use to inform the work of other news organizations.
What solutions journalism stories would you recommend to someone who is less familiar with the concept?
I would definitely go to Education Lab at The Seattle Times, because that is our oldest, biggest project. There is a project in commercial TV — the KXAN NBC affiliate in Austin, Texas that did an amazing solutions-focused story on violence in schools, the connection to mental illness, and efforts being undertaken in Texas and elsewhere to confront that.
There was a great project by the Chattanooga Times Free Press called the Poverty Puzzle, and it looked at not just poverty in the counties surrounding Chattanooga, but the growing wealth divide as the technology sector Chattanooga boomed but left a lot of people behind. Over the course of a 40,000 word project, it got at efforts by faith-based groups, community development schools, and businesses who were taking on these wealth and income gap problems. They examine whether these were working or not, and if they were working, how did they work, in a way that helped to inform not just public discussion but also public policy. The city and the surrounding counties got a huge amount of attention and traction and it really did seem that it changed the conversation from what’s wrong and whose fault is that to , what are the efforts emerging in our community that we really should be paying attention to?
What is your vision for solutions journalism in the next ten years?
We used to joke that in ten years we would be out of business because solutions journalism would be universally practiced and we could retire to a nice island somewhere. We are now seven years in, and it looks like that original hypothesis was slightly optimistic. In 10 years, I think it’s realistic to expect that journalism as a field will have tipped, and that the great majority of journalists and news organizations by then will not just recognize solutions journalism as an important principle, but actually will be routinely putting it into practice as a regular part of the news mix. That will be almost universally true in the United States and increasingly true outside the United States as we build partnerships to bring this to more and more markets.
As a result of that, there will be first of all, greater citizen awareness of solutions journalism as a thing and more demand for that sort of reporting because people will recognize that a significant change in the quality of civic discourse is in the civic interest. We would expect that over time, solutions journalism will help to ease division and partisanship as people argue less about whose fault it is and discuss more how to fix what’s wrong. More than that, people, communities and civic leaders will be better equipped to solve problems because solution stories will speed the circulation of responses that work and understanding of how they work to the people and communities that need that intelligence to solve problems.
What is something exciting that you’ve seen recently from a media organization other than your own?
Joy Mayer is doing incredibly important work at Trusting News Project to help journalists better understand their relationships with audiences, and to restore trust in those relationships. Report for America has embarked on a massively important experiment to sustain reporting capacity in at-risk newsrooms. And — this is not exactly journalism— BMe (short for black male empowerment) is introducing the idea of asset framing: defining people and communities by their assets and aspirations rather than their challenges. We hope to work with BMe to introduce this frame in news organizations.
Rapid Fire Questions
What is your first read in the morning?
The New York Times, religiously, via my iPad.
What would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role, within or outside of media?
I’m already doing it! I own and publish The Boulder Monitor, a weekly newspaper and site in Jefferson County, Montana. I bought it a bit more than a year ago.
