Organizing Solutions Coverage in the Newsroom

It helps to have some actionable and relevant story ideas in mind when you’re introducing solutions journalism to the newsroom. Ideally, these ideas should illuminate the potential for solutions journalism to build on, or round out, priority coverage areas. Discuss with reporters how solutions journalism can fill gaps in overall coverage. However, simply encouraging journalists to pitch solutions-oriented stories may not be enough – you may need to be the catalyst.

As the editor, you might want to propose a story or series to get the ball rolling. Pick something that a broad audience will find interesting - a meaty topic featuring big ideas that could work in more than one place. The solutions approach works best when the issue is pervasive and widely acknowledged and can touch on a lot of interest areas. Gun violence and childhood obesity are two examples. If the problem is widely acknowledged, it’s likely that many people are trying to solve it, and some of those responses will be newsworthy.

We’re the first to acknowledge that the solutions approach isn’t appropriate for every story. It is a tool that should be used when there is a significant gap in the public consciousness about what is being done to address a problem. If you’re uncovering a new problem, the solutions angle will likely be premature. The outrage that your investigation prompts can itself be a powerful social catalyst. But witnessing wrongdoing and eliciting strong emotions—or empathy—is only one of many ways that journalism helps society self-correct. Too often, news organizations continue to stay with the watchdog role long after it has prompted considerable awareness about an injustice. This can backfire, causing people to tune out. Instead, news organizations can productively evolve their coverage to explore how people are trying to solve the problem—and what society can learn from them.

Solutions stories - or solutions series - can be big projects that extend over many months and pull resources from across the newsroom. If you aim to be ambitious with your solutions coverage, it behooves you to define the scope and activities of the project early on (even if you don’t have all the questions or solutions uncovered yet). For the series “Our Children: Searching for Solutions” on the impact of urban violence on children in communities, the Detroit Free Press decided to invest in a series of focus groups and a poll of Detroit residents to capture feedback and define the key questions and issues for reporters to cover. Articulating this vision from the beginning, and having it steeped in community engagement and feedback, helped to clarify objectives for the staff. The reporters got on board and were ultimately very enthusiastic about the final package (19 stories in total) because it aligned with the original vision of the project.

BREAK IT DOWN (AND EXTEND THE IMPACT)

Solutions stories can be hefty. Rather than feel overwhelmed by the pressure to present everything into one piece, you could instead think about the story as something to be built over time through incremental reporting and narrative exposition.

When The Seattle Times launched Ed Lab in 2013, it confronted the challenge of figuring out what solutions journalism looked like in the context of a daily newsroom. Most examples of solutions journalism at the time were long-form articles, and the team grappled with how to write stories that would excite the audience. Initially there was a pressure to make sure each story fulfilled all guidelines of a solutions story, which felt like a lot to squeeze in: the problem, the solution, historical background, research, data, caveats, characters, and so on.

Squeezing all elements into one story at times felt like short-circuiting some parts; “we were flying by the problem!” former education editor Linda Shaw recalls. So, the team changed its approach. Instead of trying to accomplish everything in one story, it began spreading out the solutions coverage out across stories. A series might launch with a scene-setter story that laid out the scope of the problem and why the audience should care, before even touching on the solutions aspect. The initial stories could also introduce central characters who returned in future stories.

Aside from helping to pace the stories better, an additional benefit to this approach is spreading out the impact of the stories over time. The audience can be brought along for the journey. "One story is easy to forget. When you spread it out over time, you keep on going back to readers about the issue, reminding them and keeping them interested," says Shaw.

It’s been said that the only bias in solutions journalism should be toward evidence, and the facts should speak for themselves like in any other news story. Is it a really big problem? Is there a system, person, or policy causing this problem that could potentially be changed? Use data to confirm that.

In presenting a solution, you need to find evidence that it works (or doesn’t work). Be honest about what the data shows and what it doesn't. Data will inoculate reporters against charges they’re giving favorable coverage to a group or an idea. Seek opportunities for your reporters to gain capacity in data journalism (online learning platforms like Lynda.com are good resources for learning Excel and data visualization tools), or find ways to share data journalism capacity with other newsrooms. The Ohio Valley ReSource has a dedicated data reporter who works across the collaborative to benefit all partner stations. She develops data visualizations, produces interactive elements like maps, and in some cases helps reporters find story ideas by interrogating data sets around a certain issue.