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 final 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.

Not all solutions journalism is great journalism.

Not all situations are best reported through a solutions lens.

Done badly, it can be just as bad as, or worse than, poor problem journalism.

But done in the right way on the right occasions, for which I hope this course has been useful for your newsroom, it has a much more powerful impact than other journalism – if you sell it right.

Sell? Yes, because marketing and journalism have more in common than we like to admit.

The hardest truth marketers have to learn is that no one cares about their product. People care about their own lives and about the product no more than the impact it has on their lives. So much so that “problem-solving” has become a marketing concept – how do we demonstrate to customers that our product can help them solve whatever problems they have in their lives?

In journalism these days, we too often rely simply on our customers’ goodwill towards us. Subscribe to save independent journalism. Subscribe or we’ll die out. Subscribe because we need to pay our staff. Imagine any other kind of industry trying to sell their product like this.

The beauty of solutions journalism is that by its very nature it helps customers solve problems. 

The best way of making sure that it’s actually solving their problems is by talking to them. Ask what they would like you to write about, how their community is responding to a problem, or what problems they have that they would like a solution for (remember how we looked at Bristol Cable’s article which investigated rent controls in France to solve a problem in Bristol?).

This newsletter course has focused on laying the groundwork for taking the first steps. If you want to take the next steps, I’ll share resources at the end of this article with practical tips for how relationship-building and audience engagement can help boost your solutions coverage. I’ll also share links to letting solutions journalism sustain your newsroom by increasing revenue.

But the good news is you’re engaging audiences simply by covering solutions.

A total of 88 percent of people told one survey that a solutions-focused story they viewed left a positive initial impression on them, compared to 74 percent for a similar problem-focused story.

The same survey, by Smith Geiger on behalf of the Solutions Journalism Network, found that 83 percent trusted the solutions story, compared to just 55 percent who said the same about the problem story. And respondents were 10 percent more likely to say the solutions story changed their understanding of an issue and would make them watch the station’s coverage again.

Another study, by the Center for Media Engagement, found that readers spent around 25 percent more time on solutions articles than non-solutions articles – a reader who spends more time on your articles is more likely to return, and has a higher lifetime value to your newsroom.

Why do you think this is? If I’m to take a stab at it, I suspect a big part of why audiences take to solutions reporting is that it lends itself to story-telling. If you forgive an annoying analogy, it’s got a beginning (the problem), a middle (the fight to solve the problem) and an end (the solution) – unlike standard news coverage, which has a beginning and only sometimes a middle.

Secondly, it shows us a future by providing a template for change, unlike traditional journalism which tells us how things are right now. And just like any good journalism, it’s fact-based.

And finally, it provides actual value by doing what it says on the tin: solving problems.

Your solutions challenge

We’ve soon reached the end of The Fix’s newsletter course in solutions journalism, and my challenge for you this time is simply to think about how you’ve used it in practice – and tell us. We’d love to know. And please feel free to encourage others to sign up if you found it useful.

To get a recap, I’ve put all of the challenges into one big document.

Learn from others

This course, as I wrote at the start, was designed to help you take the first few steps towards making your newsroom more solutions-focused within the framework of the busy news cycle.

If you’ve managed to do absolutely nothing that we’ve talked about so far, don’t beat yourself up. Read through it again, check your challenges document, and try again. And again.

Ideally, however, you’ll now be at the stage when you’re ready to go from the experimentation stage to actively making these practices a cornerstone of your newsroom’s strategic future.

I’ve collated a list of my top resources for you, the ones I return to time and time again:

The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) has shaped most of the thinking (including mine) on solutions journalism today, and the organisation is behind some of the best resources out there. I’ve picked the ones that I think may be the most relevant to you and your new strategy:

SJN’s Learning Lab contains heaps of useful guides on producing solutions journalism, engaging your audience, institutionalising solutions journalism in your newsroom, and leveraging it to boost revenue. If you don’t have enough brainspace right now to keep studying: save this article or bookmark the tabs, because you’re going to want to return to them.

The SJN Story Tracker is a fantastic place to learn from others, with thousands of stories from around the world, searchable by a range of factors such as topics, language and success factors (although not nearly enough from Europe, so if you do produce any solutions stories, add them to the database). Can you find a story that would be replicable in your newsroom?

The European Journalism Centre has created a solutions journalism playbook for reporters and newsrooms. It’s a super easy guide to follow and it’s perfect as a handout for your newsroom.

The Fix Media is behind not only the course you’ve just completed; it’s also Europe’s leading trade magazine for news leaders, attempting to crack the media management puzzle through insights, solutions and data. Here’s a few articles that may be particularly useful for you:

Engaged journalism aims to close the gap between newsrooms and audience, and it is particularly well suited to solutions. But there are a number of pitfalls to watch out for.

There’s no perfect overlap between solutions and explanatory journalism (the latter can also just be explainers such as “how to get money back on my energy bill”, which may solve a problem for readers, but do not count as solutions journalism). That said, they have a few principles in common, such as including context, not talking down to your audience and letting the questions and concerns that the members of your audience actually have guide your coverage.

We didn’t mention it by name, but we touched on solidarity journalism quite a bit in the third edition, when we talked about interviewing people afffected by a story as experts on the issue. In this article, I speak to Anita Varma, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, about how to use solidarity to fight injustices, without resorting to one-sidedness or poverty porn.

Ready to turn solutions journalism into an official project in your newsroom? This 70-page free guide by the Wall Street Journal’s Robin Kwong, published by the Association for Project Management, is gold for new project managers. This interview with Kwong is worth reading, too.

What’s next?

Thank you for taking this course in solutions journalism – I hope you’ve found it useful. 

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