Impact Stories

After the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story that explained how Baby Bonds and 529 accounts were helping people in other states save money for college, a home and/or retirement, a group of Wisconsin lawmakers proposed a bill that would bring a similar investment savings program to their state.

Melissa Fleming, the U.N.’s undersecretary-general for global communications, announced that the U.N. will take a cue from the Solutions Journalism Network and highlight solutions as well as problems in its communications. “My job at the U.N. is to communicate the state of the world,” she wrote. “To do so I could tell any number of terrifying and attention-grabbing stories. But in the long run, I’d begin to lose people. I’m increasingly working on the premise that gloom doesn’t keep people gripped. Hope does.” The U.N.’s infusion of solutions will start at the top, she added. “When U.N. Secretary General António Guterres speaks, he highlights solutions while explaining problems, and then appeals to the world to join the response.”

Next City, a nonprofit newsroom in Philadelphia with a strong focus on solutions journalism, generated $115,000 in reader revenue in 2021, part of a trend of increasing audience support for the publication. Next City puts a priority on its solutions reporting and highlights it as part of its mission.

Red/Acción, an online publication in Argentina that specializes in “periodismo humano” (aka solutions journalism), recruited seven media organizations in seven other Latin American countries to experiment with a story-sharing network. When it launched, editor David Flier wrote that the news organizations “believe that sharing these kinds of stories, the experiences and knowledge they contain, helps us imagine better solutions.” The collaboration published and shared hundreds of stories (https://www.redaccion.com.ar/secciones/red-periodismo-humano/) throughout 2021.

Solutions journalism-focused outlet Red/Acción of Argentina developed a paid syndication partnership to cross-publish stories with Infobae, a digital publication that is one of the most read Spanish-language online newspapers worldwide. Over a hundred stories were published in a dedicated section titled “Soluciones.” (https://www.infobae.com/america/soluciones/) Both outlets won multiple prizes from Adepa, the Argentinian journalism organization, for their solutions journalism, and a couple of the partnership’s stories received more than one million page views.

After The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom based in Texas, wrote about a diaper bank that helps parents obtain that costly necessity, the public responded with a flood of donations. Readers told The 19th that the story helped them understand why diapers, which can’t be purchased with federal aid, are a mostly invisible contributor to poverty, and many contributed to the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks, their local diaper banks or the National Diaper Bank Network.