Credibility Through Collaborative Innovation

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Establishing partnerships with prestigious newsrooms, such as the Seattle Times, can enhance the credibility and legitimacy of journalism efforts. Implementing successful projects like the Education Lab demonstrates the impact of solutions journalism, which focuses on constructive narratives in public education. Workshops are instrumental in training journalists on the principles of solutions journalism, including how to identify appropriate stories while avoiding advocacy. This model has gained traction, inspiring a network of newsrooms across the U.S. and internationally. With ongoing training initiatives, the movement has reached a wide audience, training around 30,000 journalists and extending to various regions, including Latin America, Uganda, Nigeria, and parts of Europe, showcasing a growing demand for solutions-focused journalism despite some initial resistance from journalists.

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.