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As a social justice journalist with over 25 years in the news industry, Liza Ramrayka was an early adopter of solutions journalism (at The Guardian UK) and has built a career focused on applying this reporting approach. As part of her reporting as an SJN 2023-24 HEAL Fellow, she organized a town hall meeting on teen mental health that was hosted by KALW, a Bay Area-based public radio station. She recently produced a solutions-based series on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander seniors and mental health in the Bay Area for KALW, supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Liza has delivered solutions journalism training based on her experience to a wide range of organizations, including San Francisco State University, Bay Area high schools and KALW. Liza said: “My social justice reporting has always been about what is working and how these solutions can be scaled up or replicated for greater impact, whether that’s across a state, a nation or globally. As news outlets and media consumption evolve, evidence-based solutions stories represent empowering and hopeful journalism that we desperately need right now.”

Stony Brook University launched a Master’s in Journalism program with a strong emphasis on solutions and community-driven journalism in the fall of 2022. Solutions journalism is a required course as part of the program, during which students learn the practice’s framework, analyze story examples, review existing toolkits and produce a long-form piece of reporting. Course conveners added multimedia stories and iterated on the curriculum based on students’ requests and needs. Students have also contributed to developing materials to teach SoJo modules in the undergraduate journalism program. Within a year of graduating, three of the program’s graduates were hired in newsrooms to aid in solutions-focused reporting. Educators from journalism schools across the country came to learn about adopting solutions journalism curricula during the 2024 Solutions Journalism Educators Academy hosted by Stony Brook.

Twenty journalists in Peru came together to form the Peruvian Solutions Journalism Network for Integrity (Red de Periodismo de Soluciones para la Integridad), with an initial focus on promoting investigations and debate on public contracts, which are regularly subject to corruption and other inefficiencies. The network’s first contribution was the publication of articles by its founding members, covering subjects such as citizen-led monitoring of progress of public works. The impulse for the creation of this new group came from Wilber Huacasi, a journalist at La República (a major legacy paper in Lima), who initially organized a countrywide online training that for approximately 60 Peruvian journalists, with the financial support of USAID, Peruvian foundation Gustavo Mohme Llona and the Jesuit university in Lima.

The audio department of Agence France-Presse partnered with The Conversation, a digital media publisher of journalism content written by academics and researchers, to produce “Sur la Terre,” an award-nominated podcast with increasing levels of audience engagement exploring solutions to overcome climate and ecological crises. One podcast episode focused on Caminando, a rural primary school southeast France’s Drôme region where children are taught a curriculum different from those of mainstream educational institutions that emphasizes human beings’ relation to the natural world. Taking stock of the story’s data showing the effectiveness of Caminando’s teaching methods, the principal of the area’s main high school, Gerald Bennetot-Deveria, reached out to develop a connection between the two institutions, including receiving training on nature-enhanced learning for its teachers. He also wrote to local officials of the Education Ministry to ensure the nature-focused school continued receiving financial support.