Impact Stories

Global Press Journal [November 2021]: A Global Press Journal story about how a group of farmers helped save the lives of cattle and reduced air pollution in the process led their city to follow their lead. The story, published in April 2021, explained how farmers in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, figured out that leftover stalks and leaves from their corn crops could feed cattle when drought killed the grass they usually consumed. Selling those leftovers rather than burning them (as farmers in that area usually do), also led to a decrease in air pollution. By November, the head of the city of Cuauhtémoc’s ecology department announced that the city would stop burning leftover corn stalks and leaves, too, crediting the story as one impetus for the policy change.

KUNR [October 2021]: KUNR Public Radio in Nevada, in association with Noticiero Móvil and This Is Reno, won a national 2021 Murrow Award for Excellence in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the small market radio category. KUNR’s win recognized bilingual solutions reporting done by Natalie Van Hoozer (a 2021 Solutions Journalism Network LEDE fellow) about the pandemic and public health. The Murrow Awards are administered by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA).

Gambit [October 2021]: Gambit, a New Orleans alternative weekly newspaper, hosted a solutions focused forum with the top three candidates for a local citywide council seat. The event followed a series of housing-focused solutions stories Gambit published earlier in 2021. Like the solutions stories themselves, the forum focused on lessons learned from other responses to housing crises, including one
on post-Hurricane Katrina housing initiatives. “Asking the questions from a solutions-based perspective … changes the way you, and by extension the candidates and public, think about an issue,” said Gambit Editor John Stanton.

JoAnna Haugen [September 2021]: JoAnna Haugen, who writes solutions-focused travel stories, was one of the five winners in the storytelling category for Newsweek's Future of Travel Awards. “Filling a gap in travel journalism today, JoAnna Haugen seeks out hidden stories that may hold powerful solutions to the issues that plague the planet,” wrote Norie Quintos, one of the judges and a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler.

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.”

Civil Eats [September 2021]: 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.