Seeing Beyond the Problem: How Solutions Journalism Can Empower Your Worldview
A report about a failing public service can tell us something essential. It can expose a gap between what people need and what an institution provides. But once the problem is clear, I sometimes find myself wanting another part of the story: has anybody tried to address it?
That question does not cancel the first. It follows it.
I wrote about solutions journalism when this blog was quite new. Looking back, I think I was trying to describe why the second question interested me. I did not want journalism to become more comforting. I wanted it to reveal more of what was actually happening.
Showing what is wrong is necessary. Asking what has been tried may make the account more complete.
A response is part of the story
Take a hypothetical report about a long waiting list. The first questions might be how many people are waiting, how long they wait and what explains the delays. Those are important facts. But there might also be a service elsewhere that has changed the way appointments are organised.
Would that be worth reporting? I think so, provided the journalist investigates what changed and whether there is credible evidence that it helped. A trial with promising early figures is not the same as an approach demonstrated to work over time.
The Solutions Journalism Network, for instance, makes that distinction central: report on the response, examine the evidence, draw useful insights and acknowledge the limitations.
An example or a lesson?
A story about one successful organisation can be appealing. It may have an impressive founder, an unusual method or a striking photograph. But I would not know what to take from it until I understood the conditions around its success.
Did the approach depend on unusually generous funding? Was it designed for a particular population? Did it solve one problem while creating another? Asking these questions does not diminish the effort. It helps reveal which lessons might travel elsewhere.
This is where the journalist’s work becomes more interesting to me than merely locating an inspiring person.
That distinction also changes the kind of ending I would want to write. Instead of closing with the claim that a programme offers hope, I might explain the one part of it that other communities could examine, along with the question its results have not answered. A good ending need not make the problem disappear. It can leave the reader with a more precise understanding of how change was attempted.
Carrying forward...
As my interests have expanded, I have become more attentive to the difference between presenting information and making it usable. A report can supply useful context without telling readers what position to take.
That seems a worthwhile ambition for solutions journalism. It can give an audience something more than a diagnosis while stopping short of prescribing a cure.
