Leah Todd Lin, New England regional collaborative manager for the nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network talks solutions journalism and how it’s changing the way we do news

By Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, The Laconia Daily Sun

On this episode of The Granite Beat hosts Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart speak with Leah Todd Lin, New England regional collaborative manager for the nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network, about solutions journalism – what it is, why it’s important, and how it can transcend news from depressing to hopeful for consumers and journalists alike.

This transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Adam Drapcho:

How do you define solutions journalism? Why does it matter?

Leah Todd Lin:

Solutions journalism is rigorous reporting on the responses to social problems, in addition to reporting on the problems themselves. A lot of us as journalists are trained to investigate and uncover problems that folks should know about in order to make some kind of a change. That is only half of the equation, though, and journalists should really be doing much more to give audiences information about what's working, or what at least is being tried to address some of these problems. If you give a roomful of students a whiteboard, and you ask them to write down as many problems in their community as they can, the whiteboard will be full in just a couple of minutes. If you ask them what's actually working to make progress on any one of those problems in your community, I think it'll take a lot longer for people to be able to come up with information about what is actually making progress. And journalists really think the same way, we're not trained to give a lot of attention to what's being tried to address some kind of problem. So our organization was founded about 10 years ago to address that gap in local and national news. Our hope is that audiences will notice some kind of a change and they'll feel more connected, more interested, and more inspired by their local news organizations when those outlets give them information that they can use – not just information that explains the problem or leaves folks feeling kind of helpless and without a sense of direction of who's doing something about it. So I think it matters because the sort of community that we want to live in is a community that doesn't just talk about the problem, but a community that's involved in and aware of potential solutions. And it also matters for the news business. Because as we think about declining circulations and a sort of challenging financial moment for local news that we're in, solutions journalism actually helps to make a better news product that we think people are more willing to pay for, donate to, subscribe to, and engage with. That helps us as journalists, and it also helps communities.

Adam Drapcho:

How might someone be able to tell if a piece of journalism was produced with a solutions mindset? How would that piece of reporting look different or sound different?

Leah Todd Lin:

One way to tell would be if you feel at the end of a news story a sense of, “Wow, there is something that can be done about this issue in my town that I didn't know about before.” I think that's the key moment for an audience member to say, this is something different, this is solutions journalism. And the way we think about that on the journalist side is that there are four key parts to a strong solutions journalism story. The number one thing is, is this story about a response to a problem, and even if that response failed, what we can learn from this effort that didn't turn out as expected. It doesn't have to be an effort that worked 100% of the time – I think solutions to social problems rarely are 100% effective. And it's much more a question of how is that working, and in what ways is it not working. It's much more nuanced. So we talked about the stories being primarily about responses to problems, so does the story give meaningful detail about what this response is and how it works, how it came about? A good solution story should also have evidence. This is the second pillar of a good solution story. How do we know that this response is working or not working? We also look for insights, so replicable insights or bits of information or takeaways that other communities can learn from. That's a key part of the solution story as well. And then the last one is, does the story give some sort of information about limitations? This is still good journalism – it is not public relations or advocacy – so we as journalists have to talk about what ways is this response still falling short, are there other areas of this complex social problem that aren't addressed by this response, etc. So those are the four components that journalists and audience members can look for in a solution story: Is it a response to a problem? What's the evidence? Is there an insight that we can take away or learn from? What are the limitations?

Adam Drapcho:

It seems to speak to me to sort of two different ways of approaching journalism: one being more of a spectator or pure observer, where you are standing apart from a situation or a development and simply describing what you're seeing, versus a reporter who sees themselves as part of a community and is hoping that their work might provide benefit to the community and help to find a solution. That's sort of the way that I think about it. Do you think that's accurate?

Leah Todd Lin:

To some extent. There's this question for me professionally of, what is the point of doing journalism at all, what is the point of uncovering a major issue of abuse or scandal? It's to make some positive benefit or effect some change, whether that change is toward more transparency and open government, whether that change is toward more effective decision making in your community, whether that change is to lower the homeless population. I think you can make a strong argument that all journalists are invested to some degree in the outcome of their work. That's why they and we get involved in this field. Now, we are different from advocates who actually get involved in campaigning for a particular response or participating in protests that we're covering, so there are clear boundaries for our role in journalism. But I think there's maybe a bit more connection between those two ways of thinking for me. The reason why I got into journalism was to make the world a better place, and I think that really animates a lot of people who ultimately find themselves dissatisfied with the way news is done most of the time, which is this kind of endless barrage of negative headlines that leave you as the reporter really tired and burnt out from covering endless cycles of negativity and pain in a community. And you can think about the effect on your audience who gets tired and rundown of seeing that as the only picture of their community. So I think both sides are really hungry for something different. Not to say that journalists should move into an advocacy role, though, I want to be clear on that.

Adam Drapcho:

What is the mission of Solutions Journalism Network? How does it go about that mission, and what barriers are standing in the way?

Leah Todd Lin:

Our mission is to advance the practice of solutions journalism so that the world can become a more equitable, sustainable place, so our focus primarily for the last 10 years or so has been on news organizations, mostly in the United States. We have a very small but growing section of our work that is focused internationally with some projects in Europe and Africa, but most of our work has been domestic here in the US. So primarily we work with news organizations and individual journalists who are interested in learning this approach, and the vast majority of our activities have been training-related activities. We do workshops, we offer seminars, webinars. We also do some funding – we ourselves receive funding from organizations that are interested in supporting the local news ecosystem, and then we subgrant those funds, sometimes to news organizations when we think it'll really make a difference, to teach and embed this approach for the newsroom to really learn this skill and continue practicing solutions journalism long after our involvement goes away. In terms of barriers, I think for a long time there was a cultural bias in journalism that the only stuff that mattered was the big problem focused on very heavy investigation, right? You think about the Boston Globe spotlight team or uncovering the abuse in the Catholic Church and those sorts of hard-hitting gotcha investigations. And so early on that was a barrier for us coming in to say, there's this other sort of information that your community really wants and journalists are not providing. So we had to make that case to newsrooms in the early days. But I think there's been a shift recently. The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, for instance, just hired their first leader of solutions journalism and now teaches this as a part of their journalism curriculum, which is just one example of how the real pillars of the journalistic community in the US are starting to see the value of this practice and embrace it in a new way. So I think that cultural barrier has been addressed. Then the other has been how everyone in local news today is wearing about 10,000 hats. Newsrooms in many cases are smaller than they used to be, and so it becomes a real challenge to say, I have X number of hours in my day as an editor or a reporter, what are the stories that I can realistically do and do well? I think the barrier to sustained practice in a newsroom really is about news reporters having enough time in their day, and seeing this as a priority to maybe give up on some of the lower value coverage, turning around a press release, or covering a local event in order to dedicate time and resources on this more enterprising work, which takes a little bit more time in the research and development of these stories. So those are two big barriers that we've honed our approach on over the years.

Adam Drapcho:

It seems like what you're talking about is a fundamental change in how we do our work. And I wonder if you see that as being an element that could stabilize news organizations and provide a clear path for the future beyond just how we deliver that work or structure budgets.

Leah Todd Lin:

I think that's exactly right. There are a lot of innovations in the journalism landscape today that are about product. Everybody needs an email newsletter right now, there are a lot of innovations that are about the business model, there are very bold bets in philanthropy happening right now on nonprofit news organizations. And I think there's real value to that, but there are also for-profit news organizations that have all kinds of models that are doing quite well for their communities, and are able to sustain their operations. So there are these various innovations across products, business model platforms, you name it, and ours really cuts across all those different sectors and says, What is your audience willing to pay for? What is your audience going to come back to time and time again? No gimmick of an app on your cell phone or making the news really easy to use and digest is going to solve the fundamental problem of the news being a depressing product to read or engage with every day. So our work is really centered on focusing on that problem and solving for that part of local news, and making the news something that is a vital part of your day that helps you be a better member of the community. And that doesn't just involve reading about everything that's wrong with your town, but understanding the real changemakers and the folks who are making a real difference.

This article is part of The Granite Beat, a project by The Laconia Daily Sun and The Granite State News Collaborative, of which Laconia is a partner. Each week Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, will explore with local reporters how they got some of the most impactful stories in our state and why they matter. This project is being shared with partners in The Granite State News Collaborative.