Collection

TEMPLATE: Solution Stories that Have Impact

Solutions Journalism

Solutions Journalism Network

New York, NY, USA

Media Training Professional

This collection was curated by the Solutions Journalism Network for you, XXX. We invite you to read the stories in this collection to expand and deepen your understanding of the challenges and opportunities about XXX.

More and more people around the world are saying how tired they are of the 24-hour news cycle and seeing negative news on their news feeds. In fact, in the United States, about 66 percent of respondents to a survey say they’re experiencing news fatigue. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this trend with people getting worn out by the deluge of information, leaving them feeling depressed and powerless. In the United Kingdom, about 56 percent of respondents who said they avoid news about COVID-19 say it’s because “it had a bad effect on my mood.” And about 71 percent of Australians say they avoid coronavirus news because they're tired of. it. These figures shouldn’t be surprising because a lot of journalism tends to focus on society’s problems and what’s going wrong.

Solutions journalism strives to flip that narrative on its head. Instead, stories focus on what’s working, how communities respond to problems, and how effective those solutions are. The stories in this collection highlight strong examples of rigorous, evidence-based reporting on responses to social problems and the impact that these stories can have on engaging audiences and leading to real-world change. The questions that accompany these stories are designed to help you think about the key ingredients that make a good solutions story and to reflect on your own news consumption habits.

You can find solutions journalism stories on the websites of many news organizations (check out more about that here), and we encourage to see if your favorite news outlet does this type of reporting.  And if you want to quickly find stories on an issue you care about, you can do that by searching the Solutions Story Tracker, a resource that is available to you as a college student for free. 

Finally, if you want to add stories you find to this collection, or create a new collection on another topic, you can do that, as well.

Here's how:

1. With this collection open, click on the LOGIN/REGISTER button in the upper right corner of the website and select Register Here.

2. In the "Join Today" box, select that you are "Not a journalist, but I want to learn about solutions." 

3. Fill in the rest of the information — that you are a student, your name and email, create a password (anything will do, we're not picky), and in the referred by box, please add your professor's name.

4. Now, open the collection again and this time, click on the "Copy and Customize" button to the right. Now the collection is yours to add to as you'd like. When you want to come back to it, you'll find it saved to "My Collections" under your name in the upper right corner of the page.

5. When you find a story you'd like to add to the collection, simply click on the bullet icon in the story detail page and select this collection to add the story. 

6.  To create a new collection from scratch, just click the bullet icon in the story detail page and instead of adding a story to an existing collection, select "create a new collection." 

Here's a custom search link in the SST of stories that focus on solutions to XXX to get you started!

External Links