If you have ever heard the historic journalistic mantra “If it bleeds, it leads,” you know that news headlines and stories are often dominated by negative stories about topics like violence, crime, and corruption. After all, professional journalists' system of news values tends to prioritize stories that deviate from the norm, and that deviation regularly comes in the form of violations. And while that may be natural, these negative stories tend to dominate news cycles, audience attention and audience memory.
News audiences are attracted to negative news across many beats—and when it comes to politics, in particular, we are more likely to click on negative news headlines and more likely to be influenced by negative political stories. In fact, scholars have long documented a “negativity bias,” through which people pay more attention and devote more mental effort to consuming negative information. But at the same time, negative news can have a draining impact on audiences, who regularly complain about it and often avoid it.
In a modern media attention economy in which news consumers are often wary, or avoidant, of a constant deluge of negative news, solutions journalism is a modern and still-developing branch of journalism that seeks to reflect its name. Through solutions journalism, reporters cover a wide variety of social issues facing citizens in a way that hones in on and emphasizes the potential responses, or solutions, to those issues. The stories that result provide deeply reported, in-depth information about a particular issue and make clear to audiences what possible means of solving that issue have been or may be applied. Solutions journalism advocates believe that pairing problems with their potential responses in rigorous, evidence-based reporting helps to provide audiences with a more complete and dynamic understanding of the issues that shape and influence their communities, as well as what role they can take in combating those issues. And by doing so, solutions journalists hope to make individual readers more informed and efficacious citizens.
Solutions journalism stories cover an enormous variety of social ills and injustices, but they are united by their shared focus on a solution’s effectiveness, limitations, and resulting lessons. For example, reporters have applied solutions journalism practices to cover how teachers are improving classroom discipline practices, how Los Angeles community leaders are fostering more inclusive activism, how New York social justice experts are opening doors for prison reform, how numerous communities are working to reduce violent crimes, and how medical leaders are improving access to health care, among many other issues. As evidenced by these few examples, solutions journalism is ideally situated to local news, because it can help connect and inform local audiences facing shared and specific systemic problems. Hundreds of published solutions journalism stories that follow this model can be found on the website of the Solutions Journalism Network, an organization founded in 2013 to share, track, and research this practice while helping newsroom employees to implement solution journalism into their work.
According to the Solutions Journalism Network, solutions journalists remember and repeat four critical steps in their work:
Another way of remembering these four key steps is to remind one’s self to tell the “WHOLE story” through this pneumonic device:
Through this model, the response to the problem remains the focus of a story from beginning to end. Thus, solutions-oriented stories are not merely stories about a problem that end with a quick paragraph about ways people are thinking of solving that problem.
It is important to note that the “solution” reporters focus their stories on in this practice doesn’t have to be a perfect or even largely effective response to an issue. Occasionally, the response might be ineffective or only partially effective. However, by sharing insights about the potential response, solutions journalism can help audiences learn from both failed and perfected responses. And although solutions-oriented stories focus on potential responses to systemic challenges—a strategy that can help to engage audiences who are overwhelmed by typically negative news—these stories are not strategically positive “good news” pieces. Instead, they find specific newsworthiness in the examination and coverage of solutions for the problems that citizens face, especially when those solutions arise outside of traditional social structures.
Solutions journalism supporters believe that this approach to news construction makes readers more engaged with news about issues facing their communities. Additionally, research suggests that people who consume solutions-oriented journalism are more likely than consumers of traditional news to share the stories they read and seek out additional information about the problems being covered. This finding might also bode well for journalistic revenue, because engagement drives news consumption. And according to the Solutions Journalism Network, “People are likely to pay for news that helps them understand how the world works.” For these reasons, a large number of mainstream American news outlets, including the Boston Globe and the Seattle Times, have adopted solutions journalism practices in their news coverage in recent years.
Solutions journalism stories present responses to important social problems through evidence-based reporting that makes clear how the response is effective, what its limitations are, and what insights can be gained from that response.
Solutions journalism stories are driven by the need to engage and inform communities, not to give them “good news.” They are critical and detailed examinations of a potential solution, not soft news pieces worshiping or glorifying a social actor or problem response.
Research shows that solutions-oriented journalism can engage readers, make them more informed, increase their likelihood of sharing news, and drive them to seek out additional information about the issue being covered.