Impact Stories

A series of IowaWatch stories on how rural communities survive and thrive received the most reader engagement that Suzanne Behnke, the organization’s editor, said she’s ever experienced in her two years at the publication. One example: “How a handful of Iowa towns thrive, rise above rural decline.”

Solutions stories on regenerative dairies were among the most-read Civil Eats stories in 2021. “The Nation’s First Regenerative Dairy Works with Nature to Heal the Soil — at Scale” and “Is the Future of Big Dairy Regenerative?” each received more than 15,000 page views, two of the 15 Civil Eats stories that reached that level in that calendar year.

In Alamosa, Colorado, law enforcement is reducing the jail population and issuing fewer arrest warrants by referring more people to treatment, recognizing that drug abuse is at the root of some criminal behavior. After the Las Vegas Optic in New Mexico wrote about that effort, called LEAD for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, officials in the city of Las Vegas, as well as in San Miguel County, New Mexico, are working to put it in place. San Miguel County also has purchased a building it plans to turn into a treatment facility. LEAD is a nationwide program that first launched in Seattle in 2011.

El Colectivo 506, a grassroots news organization in Costa Rica, hosted a Zoom call in which rural journalists, national and regional authorities and readers discussed the newsroom’s coverage of how communities can better prepare for and prevent climate disasters. As a result, people from different parts of Costa Rica met one another and shared ideas about how national and regional leaders can work together. The richness of the discussion convinced El Colectivo 506 to host more such solutions-oriented conversations.

During the second half of July 2021, Santa Cruz Local, a two-year-old outlet, launched a reader revenue campaign to support its reporting on homelessness. Within two weeks, staff members raised about $20,000 from roughly 100 local readers, their most successful fundraising campaign to date. Solutions journalism featured prominently in their phone and email solicitations to readers. Kara Meyberg Guzman, CEO and co-founder, said supporters who contributed to this coverage frequently mentioned its focus on responses to homelessness (solutions journalism), holding local government to account and featuring underrepresented people with nuance and complexity.

Egab, an online platform that enables local journalists across the Middle East and Africa to pitch stories in any format or language to editors of regional and international media outlets, received $100,000 from the Google News Initiative's Innovation Challenge. The platform specializes in solutions journalism and emphasized this editorial approach in its application for a grant, adding that several of the news organizations that have published Egab-originated stories say their audience surveys have shown that audiences engage more with solutions-oriented content.