Impact Stories

Amazônia Vox’s award-winning solutions series on infant mortality led to public action in Brazil. A member of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Pará (Alepa), Carlos Bordalo (Workers’ Party), introduced a bill to prioritize pregnant women from riverside communities in the state’s public health system. Bordalo also delivered a Vote of Applause for the series’ reporting. Alepa’s official website mentions the Amazônia Vox report, and Bordalo posted on social media that the report inspired the proposed legislation. The bill is awaiting a vote by Assembly members, and if approved, will proceed to the state government for sanctioning. At the federal level, an advisor for Alessandra Haber, a national legislator from Pará, contacted Amazônia Vox, as Haber plans a public legislative hearing in Brasília, in early 2025, to discuss solutions for improving health care for pregnant women in riverside communities. The report is also mentioned in Haber's proposal. In the Federal Senate, Senator Zequinha Marinho (Podemos) issued a motion of commendation from the legislative house for the report and its Roche Health Journalism Award from the Gabo Foundation.

As a social justice journalist with over 25 years in the news industry, Liza Ramrayka was an early adopter of solutions journalism (at The Guardian UK) and has built a career focused on applying this reporting approach. As part of her reporting as an SJN 2023-24 HEAL Fellow, she organized a town hall meeting on teen mental health that was hosted by KALW, a Bay Area-based public radio station. She recently produced a solutions-based series on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander seniors and mental health in the Bay Area for KALW, supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Liza has delivered solutions journalism training based on her experience to a wide range of organizations, including San Francisco State University, Bay Area high schools and KALW. Liza said: “My social justice reporting has always been about what is working and how these solutions can be scaled up or replicated for greater impact, whether that’s across a state, a nation or globally. As news outlets and media consumption evolve, evidence-based solutions stories represent empowering and hopeful journalism that we desperately need right now.”

Stony Brook University launched a Master’s in Journalism program with a strong emphasis on solutions and community-driven journalism in the fall of 2022. Solutions journalism is a required course as part of the program, during which students learn the practice’s framework, analyze story examples, review existing toolkits and produce a long-form piece of reporting. Course conveners added multimedia stories and iterated on the curriculum based on students’ requests and needs. Students have also contributed to developing materials to teach SoJo modules in the undergraduate journalism program. Within a year of graduating, three of the program’s graduates were hired in newsrooms to aid in solutions-focused reporting. Educators from journalism schools across the country came to learn about adopting solutions journalism curricula during the 2024 Solutions Journalism Educators Academy hosted by Stony Brook.

Ethan Brown, founder and host of the award-winning climate comedy podcast “The Sweaty Penguin,” has been hired as the journalism program consultant at the University of Rhode Island’s Metcalf Institute. Ethan says: “My motivation to join Metcalf came in part from my experience co-facilitating the Train-the-Trainers sessions through SJN’s Climate Cohort in April 2024, and subsequently training The Deerfield Scroll on SoJo. I really enjoyed being able to have a larger impact than just my own work, helping other journalists cover climate solutions.” At Metcalf, he is leading the new Climate and Environmental Science Fellowship for Local Journalism, which includes a training in science-supported solutions journalism, drawing on insights he learned as a solutions journalism writer and SJN trainer.

Twenty journalists in Peru came together to form the Peruvian Solutions Journalism Network for Integrity (Red de Periodismo de Soluciones para la Integridad), with an initial focus on promoting investigations and debate on public contracts, which are regularly subject to corruption and other inefficiencies. The network’s first contribution was the publication of articles by its founding members, covering subjects such as citizen-led monitoring of progress of public works. The impulse for the creation of this new group came from Wilber Huacasi, a journalist at La República (a major legacy paper in Lima), who initially organized a countrywide online training that for approximately 60 Peruvian journalists, with the financial support of USAID, Peruvian foundation Gustavo Mohme Llona and the Jesuit university in Lima.

As part of her work as a 2024 HEAL Fellow, Morgan Watkins helped prompt critical discussions about deploying solutions journalism within her newsroom, Louisville Public Media (LPM). These discussions led to a new editorial plan launched in summer 2024, which has begun to be implemented. Watkins says: “Our newsroom has made a decision to focus the vast majority of our stories on three principles: solutions, accountability and community-generated story ideas. We’ve heard from our community that they want to know what others are doing — and what they can do — to address the challenges we face. We decided to be more intentional about solutions journalism, because we want to better serve our community. Our aim is to continue our work toward becoming a trusted source of local news for more people in our community by diversifying our offerings and by serving more residents of our community who have been traditionally sidelined in the media.” LPM has produced more than 10 solutions-centered stories since launching its new strategy.