Solutions Journalism Is So Necessary to Prepare Our Civic Fabric

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Journalism is going through two different crises at once. We have our economic crisis, which began with cragslist turn of te century and stripped newspapers, of classified advertising,. goga, facebook now take, i don't know, 80 % of all on line adds. And a lot of them are trying to find different business models, subscriptions, memberships, philanthropy. But the ones that are going to be successful at that are news organizations that do things differently. The new forms of revenue for newspapers, or any news organization, sell journalism to readers. It's a very different equation, and it's one that's much more lined with good journalism, sometimes with our work on your

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.