Impact Stories

Enlace Latino NC & Southerly (2022): Enlace Latino NC, a Spanish-language publication in North Carolina, and Southerly, a now-defunct publication reporting on environmental issues in the South, jointly covered the convergence of economic mobility and environmental issues in rural Latinx and immigrant communities in North Carolina. Their 2021 work and collaboration, funded in part by SJN, was recognized with the award for Collaboration of the Year (https://www.lionpublishers.com/meet-the-winners-of-the-2022-lion-local-journalism-awards/) in the small revenue category from LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers. Judges said: “This partnership is an excellent example of how deep trust between collaborators and a shared desire to serve a community can result in real impact. Beyond its immediate impact, the collaboration also led an outlet [Enlace Latino NC] to start practicing solutions journalism, which is a huge win.”

A 2014 New York Times story titled "Teaching Children to Calm Themselves" about Head Start Trauma Smart, which helps children address trauma, led to an expansion of the program from two to 12 states by September 2022, and a huge surge of interest. “It took me two and a half years to catch up with the waiting list of people who wanted to be contacted from that one article,” said Janine Hron, former CEO of the Crittenton Children’s Center, where the program was developed. In New York City, the Trauma Smart program has become part of the city’s mental health strategy.

NBC (September 2022): Inspired by a Boston Globe article (https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/24/opinion/take-this-cash-call-me-morning/) about how a small amount of money can be as important as medicine in treating patients, the TV series “New Amsterdam” featured that idea in an episode (https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/are-money-atm-prescriptions-real-new-amsterdam), one of the first times — if not the first — that a solutions story from SJN’s Story Tracker was used as the basis for a TV show.

Prism (September 2022): After Prism, a national nonprofit led by journalists of color, published a story that examined the advantages of a four-day workweek, the publication itself adopted a four-day schedule (https://prismreports.org/2022/05/18/four-day-workweek-gaining-momentum/). In an article explaining that decision (https://prismreports.org/2022/09/15/prism-adopts-four-day-workweek/), Ashton Lattimore, Prism's editor-in-chief, said the newsroom found that the benefits far outweighed the challenges.

Columbia College Chicago (2022): Jordyn Harrison won in the “Places” category of the 2022 Student Magazine Contest organized by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for her solutions story “Growing Community in Vacant Chicago Lots.” She wrote this story, which was published by Yes! magazine, as part of Professor Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin’s solutions journalism course at Columbia College Chicago in Fall 2021.

Montana Free Press (2022): In expanding its coverage into five new markets, Montana Free Press found that local-level solutions reporting had the potential to increase readership at a higher rate than traditional reporting. Locally based solutions stories published in those new markets attracted 53% more unique visitors than the average local story and garnered 40 percent more newsletter signups than other stories. In addition, the number of people who read the solutions stories all the way through was almost 50 percent higher than those reading traditional problem-based stories.