Solutions journalism course: where are the solutions in a world of problems?

Editor’s note: Journalists often get bogged down in reporting on problems. But growing evidence shows that readers want coverage of solutions. We’re republishing the second instalment from The Fix’s course on solutions journalism by Emma Löfgren. Subscribe to access the full course for free in seven weekly instalments delivered to your email inbox.

The solutions journalism approach reframes the way we look at journalism to see it not only as something that exposes problems, but something that shows us how they can be fixed.

But in a world of problems, where are the solutions?

I’ll let you in on a secret: your newsroom is probably already doing solutions journalism.

Or at least, the basic tenets are there in your work.

That story about a local shop that survived the death of the high street and is thriving against all odds? Or the after-school group that tutors struggling schoolchildren? Or your short news story about there being fewer accidents on main street this year compared to last?

They’re all stories we see all the time in local papers, but they’re often just written as a short update, a glorifying hero portrait or a feature that borders on advertising. With the help of the four pillars of solutions journalism, they could grow from feel-good to how-to. It would make them more rounded, more insightful, more valuable and frankly, more interesting to read.

There are three questions I ask myself before pursuing a solutions story:

• Can people learn from this story?
• Does it offer a new perspective?
• Is it a good story?

And honestly, that’s not that different from most reporting.

Similarly to the old “man bites dog” adage (we look for negative stories that stand out – if a dog bites a man it’s not news because it happens every day, but a man biting a dog deviates from the ordinary), look for positive stories that break the mould, that stand out from the rest.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Malmö, a southern Swedish city that’s often grabbed international headlines over gang crime. This is a story that’s so well known it’s become interlinked with the city even during periods of falling crime rates. Say Malmö to someone and if you’re lucky they think of startups and food alongside crime – but usually, it’s only the latter that rings a bell.

One of the perks of solutions journalism is the new angle it offers.

When I went to Malmö on a reporting trip in 2017, there wasn’t much more that could be written about crime. That story was important, but it had been done, many times.

Instead, I found this story about how community-wide efforts had begun to edge out drug lords in one of the city’s most notorious areas.

The story didn’t state that there was no more crime in Malmö, or that drugs had been wiped off the street, but it showed the power of people’s response to a problem.

So to make the sceptics in your newsroom bite, it may make sense to ignore the talk about the benefits of solutions journalism (although we will talk about the benefits later on in this course).

It may be as simple as explaining it as a new angle on an old story. If there’s one thing even the most cynical of reporters love, it’s a fresh perspective that moves the same old chestnut on.

Your solutions challenge

My practical challenge for you is to find a response to a problem.

This is designed to help you retrain your mind to look for positive deviants – stories that could be told from a solutions framework. You can go about this in whichever way you like, but here are five of my top tips for non-time-consuming solutions sourcing:

• Dig through the archives from, say, one year ago to find a story about the launch of a project (for example free school meals, a new job centre, a networking group for pensioners, or whatever else is relevant for your community and news organisation). Now go back to that project to see what the result was. Was it successful? What can we learn from it?
• Sign up for university press releases. A lot of academic studies reveal positive trends in various areas, and best of all, they’ve already done most of the background work for you.
• “Who’s doing this better?” Inserting this one question in your interviews, even if you’re writing about a problem and not a solution, could help you discover new leads you didn’t know existed.
• Find inspiration among your peers. Maybe you’ve read a great solutions-inspired story about something in another country or another town. Can your newsroom replicate that on its own beat? I recommend the Solutions Journalism Network’s Story Tracker, a database of thousands of solutions stories from around the world on a huge array of topics, vetted by experts.
• Statistical databases. National census bureaus or international databases such as Eurostat, the World Health Organization or OECD are perfect to discover data stories. Journalists often turn to these to look for negative trends; make a habit of keeping an eye out for positive deviants instead.

Learn from others

Transitions Online is a news site which covers Central and Eastern Europe, often from a solutions journalism perspective. In 2022 they launched a solutions journalism cohort of five newsrooms to help them transform their work and become more solutions-focused.

Read more here about what solutions stories the newsrooms tackled, how they integrated solutions in their work in various ways, and examples of the stories they produced.

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com

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