Please see comments for a stream-of-consciousness update on how the lesson went and my faculty and students’ responses to Solutions Journalism. TBM 01/10/2025
Happy new year!
Fortunately, I am getting to start my new calendar year at school with Global Week, our ever-inspiring intersession. This year, our theme is “Bridging Divides: The Art of Listening, The Journey of Learning.” Overall, this topic means we are learning how to fight polarization.
To my great delight, I was asked to run a class on Solutions Journalism ahead of our final speaker, who works in that field. I’ve long been interested in this style of reporting, and was delighted to have a reason to learn more about the concept. As the child of an old-school journalist, it is exciting to see a movement trying to shift away from “if it bleeds, it leads” (the historical version of clickbait, one might argue) and instead look at news focused on positivity and hope.
It is fascinating to dig into what that premise looks like in practice. A far cry from human interest and hero-worship, I am finding Solutions Journalism to be an approach that allows room and provides methods for difficult discussions, while drawing on the evidence-based standards that I value from growing up discussing my father’s work.
As articulated by the Solutions Journalism Network, the four principles of the approach are:
“1 Response: Focuses on a response to a social problem — and on how that response has worked, or why it hasn’t;
“2 Insight: Shows what can be learned from a response and why it matters to a newsroom’s audience;
“3 Evidence: Provides data or qualitative results that indicate effectiveness (or a lack thereof); and
“4 Limitations: Places responses in context; doesn’t shy away from revealing shortcomings.”
What I like about this framing is that it leaves room for hope. Even when programs go wrong (which the method encourages journalists to write about), the goal is not to assess and place blame, but to analyze what we have learned so we can do better next time.
Even more consistently, the method gets away from all the messiness of the (broadly misunderstood) notion of “objectivity” of media, which carries not only a history of enabling limited perspectives in storytelling that glossed over social ills (like racism) but which also somehow got us to this idea that we have to pick two sides (no more, no fewer) and give them equal weight. It does not call for pro-and-con retellings, but asks journalists to look at a tried solution to a problem and see strengths, admit weaknesses, and embrace nuance.
The mindset is, in and of itself, about bridging divides. The foundational attention to complicating narratives rests, in part, on the notion that accepting common pro/con narratives on a topic are standing in the way of our gaining real understanding of what is going right or wrong. There is a sense of transcending political boundaries to ask larger — perhaps even more real? — questions and get at what can actually be done to improve a situation.
As a research skills educator, I find the ways evidence is defined and used in this type of reporting to be deeply meaningful. The standard is whether evidence helps the reader understand why something happened the way it did, rather than simply, “here is someone saying something angry/happy/tearful about our topic.”
As an educator of growing humans, I am profoundly grateful that there is a way my students can engage with societal problems that focuses hard on the potential for a better world.
If you want to check out some articles, the Solutions Journalism Network has a number of ways for you to approach finding examples, from their annual round-ups of favorite articles, to their international database of examples (warning: short reads are not the same as quality reads in this method), to their collections of examples such as heroes not hero worship and constructively reporting on failures.
OK, so, um. The whole idea of this form of journalism is to write about tried solutions, not ideas. I have read about the method, but am only using it with students for the first time today. If you have worked with Solutions Journalism in your school, would you let me know in the comments or by email?
May this new year bring many positive solutions into your world.
