Last night, I went to the first training West Coast workshop held by the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), an organization founded by three journalists in 2012 to reshape the way news is told. Basically, the aim is to encourage and train journalists, whether in or outside of newsrooms, to report on news you can use to make changes in your life, your community, and the world.
It’s also an approach to uncovering hidden stories, ones that many reporters don’t ask. When writing a story about violence, for example, you could ask, “How can it be prevented, or decreased?" And, "Who is doing a better job of controlling this kind of violence?”
Rikha Sharma Rani, SJN’s intelligence director, who led the training at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, pointed to several stories that took this approach. One was headlined, “How the city is curbing sexual violence.” Another story title read, “Youth violence in Cleveland: Seeking Solutions.”
Solutions journalism, as it’s called, is not about feel good news. Rani introduced us to a list of what she calls solutions journalism imposters, such as stories about hero worship; e-hero worship, where an app can save the day; the silver bullet solution; favor for a friend, such as the Tom’s Shoes story; think tank journalism, about what has already been achieved; the afterthought, when the solution is mentioned at the very end, as if in passing; and the instant activist, when you are asked to sign a petition to make change.
The stories on ACEsConnection and ACEsTooHigh demonstrate the kind of solutions journalism Rani summarized for the crowd of news reporters and public policy students at the training. She explained that solutions journalism is a practice, not a movement. It’s another way of telling a story, one that features a response to a problem. The hero is the idea, not necessarily a person. The reporter provides evidence of the results and produces insights, not just inspiration. Reporters also discuss limitations to various solutions.
Basically, solutions journalism focuses on how to address social problems, going beyond just the identification of the problems.
Although a relatively new organization, the Solutions Journalism Network has conducted a study with the University of Texas School of Journalism on the impact of these kinds of stories versus standard news stories. They found that solutions journalism increases reader engagement: readers spend more time on the page. It also increases the reader’s sense of agency, optimism, and self-efficacy. In other words, these stories empower readers by offering them news they can use.
To demonstrate the dramatic gap in reporting between standard news and solutions journalism, Rani introduced Paul Figueroa, assistant chief of the Oakland Police Department. The Oakland native has a Ph.D. in public policy, although he started as a young police officer straight out of high school in 1991 and later served as head of communications for the OPD when Jerry Brown was mayor.
Figueroa said the city has taken major steps to decrease violence in the city. The homicide rate has decreased significantly since 1990, and since police officers have been using body cameras in 2010, police violence has declined 72 percent.
Here’s the how: With the help of social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, the department has identified 56 gangs, which can include anywhere from two or more members. Figueroa and his team meets with each gang regularly and confronts their most violent members with a “cease-fire” notice and an offer to provide stipends as well as other forms of social services, including job training and housing support. His cease-fire approach,“The violence has to stop and we have services for you,” seems to be working.
Does anyone report on these efforts and the significantly lower crime rate? No. And here’s the why. Jack Glaser, associate dean and associate professor at the Goldman School, who trained as a social psychologist, explains, “We as humans are wired to tend to negative information.” So we like to hear about violence, not about solutions to violence. And as a data scientist, he points out it is difficult if not impossible to close the data gap that could link police arrests with court convictions, so researchers can’t correlate public policies with lower crime rates.
Now that’s a problem that should merit a solution, and I’d assume a solutions journalist is uncovering a story right now about the impact of Oakland’s approach to lowering crime rates that will be backed by evidence as well as further questions. In solutions journalism, it seems, there is no end to the story.
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