The Impact of Solutions Journalism in the Newsroom

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Research shows solutions journalism produces better engagement with your audience and more trust. People tend to think of a newsroom as a civic actor of importance if they do solution journalism, rather than if they don't. There is lots of anecdotal evidence that when you talk about a problem and talk about how people are solving it successfully, it does lead to change. It's hard to measure the impact of any journalism but like investigative journalism, there isLots of anecdotal evidence that when you talks about a problem...it does lead tochange. But it is very hard to measure that impact. An engagement is the metric that matters. So i know that you guys have a data base of solutions and solutions

What is the goal of our digital information environment? Is it simply to inform us, or also to empower us to act?

The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) understands that simply reporting on social problems rarely leads to change. What they’ve discovered is that rigorously reporting on responses to social problems is more likely to give activists and concerned citizens the hope and information they need to take effective action. For this reason, SJN trains journalists to report on “solutions angles.” More broadly, the organization seeks to rebalance the news, so that people are exposed to stories that help them understand the challenges we face as well as potential ways to respond.

In this episode, Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of SJN, and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, former manager of SJN’s Complicating the Narratives initiative, walk us through the origin of solutions journalism, how to practice it, and what impact it has had. Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin reflect on how humane technology, much like solutions journalism, should also be designed to create an empowering relationship with reality — enabling us to shift from learned helplessness to what we might call learned hopefulness.