Impact Stories

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.

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.

Jodie Jackson, a longtime champion of solutions journalism and author of “You Are What You Read: Why Changing Your Media Diet Can Change the World,” launched the News Literacy Network in August 2022. A significant part of the organization’s work will be dedicated to solutions journalism, including “in-depth resources about what solutions journalism is and how to find it, with an aim to go into newsrooms in the future to talk about how to create it.”

National Public Radio hired its first climate solutions reporter, Julia Simon, in late 2022, with a mandate “to give our audiences an understanding of the scientific, behavioral and policy solutions people are adopting to address the catastrophic consequences of climate change.” Neela Banerjee, who leads the climate desk at NPR, said that many factors led to the creation of the position, including learning about solutions journalism through SJN. NPR now is producing solutions-oriented climate coverage at the national and local levels, fostered by its collaborative of individual stations focusing on this topic. In October 2023, NPR dedicated a whole week of coverage to climate solutions. (Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which supports the climate solutions position at NPR, also has funded some of SJN’s climate work.)

The 7th Trilateral Journalist Exchange Program organized by the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat (TCS), an intergovernmental foreign relations organization in East Asia, focused on solutions journalism as a means to cope with problem-centered reporting in the region. Twelve journalists from large news organizations in South Korea, China and Japan attended the event, for which SJN was a consultant.

Executives from Graham Media Group say their new digital solutions journalism program, called Solutionaries, has already attracted more than a million views on YouTube. The program was inspired by solutions journalism training that SJN provided to Graham’s seven TV stations and its national desk. Solutionaries features reports from each of Graham’s newsrooms. In November 2022, station WKMG serving Olrlando, Florida, started including a full half hour broadcast of “Solutionaries” every Tuesday.