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 fourth 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.

A few years ago, I had a plan. I was going to learn to play the ukulele.

I had never played an instrument in my life, so don’t ask me why. I just had an idea that I would somehow be naturally good at it, and had a long list in my head of fast-flowing tunes I’d play.

After a few weeks of practising chords and painstakingly bending my fingers in directions they had never before been asked to go, I put the ukulele away. I was nowhere near about to join a ukulele band, travelling the countryside in a rickety but cute mini bus. I gave up. I quit.

If I had gone in with more realistic expectations and appreciated the learning curve for what it is, I would have known that the goal is not the final symphony, it’s those first steps along the way. I would perhaps have enjoyed it more, and stuck with it, if I hadn’t set the bar way too high.

I can’t tell you how many journalists I’ve met who barely got started on their first solutions project, or who ended up with an unwieldy dissertation, because they set the bar too high.

High expectations make sense, both when it comes to your demands on the solution and the demands you place on yourself. It is a big part of what makes solutions journalism so appealing to audiences: it’s not just positive-but-empty fluff, it’s built on rigorously reported facts.

But there’s no perfect story, and there’s no perfect solution.

When you discover that several unemployed immigrants in your town enjoy a local networking meetup every Thursday to improve their job prospects – but only because of the socialising aspects, not because it’s getting them into work – it may mean the response has failed at its goals, but it doesn’t mean the story isn’t worth reporting on from a solutions angle.

Yet common reactions from journalists who are just starting out in the solutions field are to either gloss over the problems – it’s a great initiative, and participants like it, so why be negative – or see the problems as proof that the response isn’t working, and therefore isn’t a solutions story.

They’re both wrong. 

First of all, neglecting to explain the limitations means we’re not telling the whole story. And secondly, there’s still plenty that can be learned from failed, or partially failed, solutions.

Investigating the limitations gives both sides of a story, but it also helps us understand why a response works. Encourage reporters to dig into what could have been done differently, to explore if parts of the response worked and whether on balance it was still worth trying, and to ask their interviewees what could be changed in the future to make it a success.

Maybe the networking group would have been better with more structure, maybe they should have invited a speaker or read each other’s CVs instead of just sitting around talking.

Or maybe the problem was external. Maybe more funding from the local authority would have helped, or maybe the group leader could have used more time to plan ahead and prepare.

Maybe the limitation is that the overarching problem is systemic discrimination that should be dealt with on a political level, and is not something grass-root groups can be expected to fix.

Maybe the response did work and participants did find jobs – but due to limited knowledge of the community, organisers struggled to reach out to more people, so it only helped a few. 

It’s always worth digging around for limitations even if a response looks like it met its goals; if you find that limitations are missing from a reporter’s story, it may be worth pressing the issue.

Limitations teach us something. They don’t mean trying to catch a response out as being a failure; they could just be factors that would have made it even more successful, or they’re constructive points about what gaps need to be filled to tackle similar problems in the future.

Your solutions challenge

There’s a saying the Solutions Journalism Network often uses which I like: complicate the narrative. Most stories come with a range of nuances, so let’s capture all of them.

Now, when we talk about solutions journalism, we usually end up focusing on how to complicate the narrative about the problem. We might do this by shifting our lens to responses, by diversifying our sources, by interviewing people who don’t necessarily agree with each other (without resorting to both-sides-ism) or by including context and attempts to improve.

This time, I want you to complicate the narrative about the solution.

Like most of this course, this challenge isn’t designed to overhaul your newsroom into a perfect solutions journalism machine, but to help you take those first steps as you begin to experiment.

So this time, next time a feel-good story lands in your inbox, try to complicate the narrative. If it’s, say, a teacher whose class in the local school got the best grades in the region – instead of focusing on how the teacher is friendly and their students like them, focus on how they did it.

Try to make it a story about firstly the process and only secondly the people. Think of the teacher and the students as supporting characters. The lead character is the work itself. 

Ask questions (or encourage your reporters to ask questions) about the classroom tactics that went into it, what preconditions meant that this particular class was able to outperform everyone else, why this work isn’t being done in more schools, what the teacher would have needed to improve the grades in all their classes or what they need to manage to keep the grades up.

The goal isn’t to come up with reasons for why this lovely story is actually bad (“the teacher smokes during breaks and the overall score would have been better had it not been for Tim, 9, who failed” isn’t the angle we’re going for), it’s to shine a wider lens on it so others can learn.

You don’t have to centre the entire story on how they could’ve done it better (look, they already did pretty well, so they’re allowed to be celebrated), it could just be a sentence or two.

It isn’t meant to be a perfect solutions story, so don’t label it as such to the audience. 

Perhaps you’ll find out that it actually is just a one-off, and that the main reason behind the grades is that the teacher is indeed friendly and that got the students excited about learning. 

The story might not have solutions potential at all. But the goal with this exercise is to rewire your brain, and help other reporters rewire theirs, into thinking actively along solutions lines.

Learn from others

In March 2020, Lille became one of five French cities to introduce rent controls in order to keep homes affordable. But the rent controls had only limited success, with low levels of compliance.

In this article, the Bristol Cable looks into what the city of Bristol could learn from Lille’s failed response. Read this to study a solutions approach to something that didn’t solve much. 

The article lists several reasons why the response failed, primarily a lack of enforcement (partly due to a shortage of funds) which put the burden of keeping landlords in line on tenants.

But rather than dismissing it as “this shows rent controls don’t work”, the article goes deep into how such a scheme could be improved to make it work. 

Using examples from countries around the world that have tried rent controls with varying success, we learn that it would probably work better if tenants knew their rights and local governments were better equipped to enforce the rules. 

Those failures are crucial information for anyone wishing to introduce rent controls.

What’s next

In the next edition we’ll talk about the fourth and final pillar of solutions journalism: insights. We’ll work together on an inventory of your newsroom’s reporting, and I’ll share five essential tricks that will make your solutions journalism stand out from the crowd of positive news.