Impact Stories

A series of solutions stories focused on the Black community in Montgomery, Alabama, built trust that has resulted in better reporting and positive outcomes for the Montgomery Advertiser, which previously had served mostly white people in a city where the majority of residents are Black. Over two years, reporter Krista Johnson, who is white, focused a lot of her reporting on issues important to the Black community, such as an effort to turn one neighborhood into a Purpose Built Community, after a successful Atlanta revitalization program. The number of Black subscribers is up, part of an overall increase in readership that Bro Krift, the paper’s executive editor, reported was greater than at any other Gannett paper in 2019.

After investigative reporter Nichole Manna wrote about a program in Richmond, California, dedicated to ending cyclical and retaliatory gun violence, Fort Worth established a similar effort. That program, called VIP FW (Violence Intervention and Prevention Forth Worth) uses ex-convicts instead of police to intervene in and mediate conflicts. Manna's follow-up reporting (here: https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/crime/article245135960.html) found evidence that VIP FW is helping: In the first few months of its existence, its staff had talked with 175 people, spent 275 hours engaging with known or suspected shooters and mediated 25 conflicts. Its leaders believe they prevented at least 18 shootings.

The Community Voice in Wichita, Kansas, created a solutions-driven reporting project called the “The Criminalization of Poverty” as part of the Solutions Journalism Revenue Project. An introduction to the first article of the series (“They Stopped Suspending Licenses and Fine Collections Went Up”), explained the publication was “looking for solutions that work.” It used the same language in letters sent out to potential sponsors. In the first few months of fundraising, the publication raised $6,000 from private businesses and a foundation.

Mediacités, a French digital and investigative publication that operates in four major cities across France, produces community-driven collaborative reporting projects. As the pandemic reshaped social life in April 2020, the newsroom turned to its audience to glean story ideas for a solutions journalism series titled “Transforming our cities after the coronavirus”. With a focus on how to preserve social cohesion, it solicited ideas around topics such as local businesses, transport, housing, nature and solidarity. Readers submitted 175 suggestions using the website’s engagement platform called #DansMaVille (#InMyTown), which led Mediacités’ newsroom to identify 28 potential stories (https://medium.com/we-are-the-european-journalism-centre/how-mediacit%C3%A9s-worked-with-its-readers-to-explore-what-life-could-look-like-after-covid-19-1255cca6131f); to date, it has published 14 articles. The digital publication received the 2020 Innovation Award from Médias en Seine for this work.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel received $100,000 for a solutions-driven project called "Milwaukee’s Promise," led by reporter James E. Causey. This project, launched in June 2020, is focused on how to build a place where every life is valued regardless of skin color, which Causey says Milwaukee used to do to a much greater degree. The project also attracted support from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, which gave an additional grant to support the work of a Journal Sentinel photographer.

With schools around the world trying to figure out how to bring children back during COVID-19, The Local, an English-language digital news publisher in Europe, reported on a successful strategy in Denmark — keeping children outdoors much of the day. (This story was a part of a series entitled "Confronting Coronavirus.") After reading that piece, teachers in Piedmont, Italy, the region with the second-highest number of coronavirus cases in that nation, tried out many of the same measures. The Local reported on this development in “Can Outdoor Teaching Enable Italy to Safely Reopen Schools?” Piedmont’s results were good, and additional schools in Italy reopened after seeing the results.