Solutions journalism course: Five ways to steer reporters away from fluff

Editor’s note: Journalists often get bogged down in reporting on problems. But growing evidence shows that readers want coverage of solutions. We’re republishing the fifth instalment from The Fix’s course on solutions journalism by Emma Löfgren. Subscribe to access the full course for free in seven weekly instalments delivered to your email inbox.

There’s one kind of person in the newsroom who is harder to manage than those who dislike solutions journalism because they wrongly think it’s fluff: those who think it’s fluff – and love it.

They’re excited that feel-good is finally getting its moment, and forget that solutions journalism doesn’t seek only to inspire, it wants to have a concrete impact. It examines the solution in the same fact-based and critical way that investigative journalism examines the problem.

If the first three pillars of solutions journalism – response, evidence, limitations – tell us who did something and how they did it, the fourth pillar, insights, tell us how the rest of us can do it, too. I often find myself leaning on insights to explain the difference between solutions and feel-good.

Here are five ways I use insights to steer trainees away from fluff:

A story about an unemployed single parent who made a fortune from their own business may be inspiring and their story worth telling, but what do we learn from it? We learn that they’re a very capable person, but we probably don’t really learn much that helps us replicate their success.

Most of us, after all, are never going to make a fortune.

If, on the other hand, the story is how a local job centre is offering training for people without prior experience who want to start their own businesses, that could be the kind of angle we’re looking for. The parent could be one of the people you speak to for evidence it’s working.

If it additionally tells us that the job centre has had increased take-up since it moved classes from evening to daytime hours, making it easier for parents to join before their kids come home, it offers insight. Someone who wants to launch a similar future scheme could learn from this.

You’ve probably spent a lot of time telling people solutions journalism isn’t just positive journalism. That said, it is often positive, heart-warming and dare I say, makes you feel good. The people behind responses are hard-working and they’re trying to make a difference.

It’s easy to want to raise a response to the sky and gloss over any flaws, but remember that last time we talked about how limitations don’t mean “reasons this solution is actually bad”?

Insights might help reporters be less reluctant to be negative about a response they love. The best reward their journalism can give a powerful response is to help others replicate it. To do that, they need to learn not only from its successes, but its gaps or even failures.

Similarly to the above point, it’s not uncommon that journalists want to add in extra superlatives to prove to the audience that the response they’re covering has found the solution to a problem.

As in most other kinds of journalism, copy editing can make even the most average of stories shine (and I’m not just saying that as someone who earned her stripes as a sub-editor).

If the basic ingredients of solutions journalism aren’t there, it’s back to the drawing table, but in a lot of cases the copy just needs to be tidied up. Take out any adjectives such as “great”, “incredible”, “inspiring” – and actually, in nearly all cases take out the word “solution” too.

When I mentored some dozen student journalists on how to apply solutions journalism to the migration beat as part of a project a few years ago, one question that kept cropping up was: how do you write out insights in the article? Do you need to tell the audience they’re insights?

The answer is, no, you don’t. You can have a separate fact box dedicated to insights, but most of the time they’re implied in the story without needing to hit the audience on the head.

Sometimes, if you cover the other three pillars well, your story automatically includes insights. But if it doesn’t, and you’re still not quite sure what the insights are, one trick is to literally write the sentence “so what does this teach us” or “the main takeaway from this is” followed by one or two insights, and then if the first sentence interrupts the flow, take it out when editing.

Getting reporters to ask the right questions from the start helps. “What do you wish you had known at the start?” or “If someone were to replicate this response, what would they need to know?” are two fantastic questions to help you uncover the insights (we talked about interview questions in edition three and will share them again in a document at the end of this course).

“Make your story about the idea behind the programme – the programme is just the illustration,” advises the European Journalism Centre’s solutions journalism introduction. A small NGO teaching unemployed people new skills is a case study into how unemployment could be solved, but they’re primarily a device to move the plot forward. The big story is employment.

Putting the story in context allows the audience to contrast and compare (how do we know a scheme is successful if we don’t understand the scope of the problem it claims to tackle?), and to think more deeply about how other people could potentially apply the response elsewhere.

Widening the lens is important for another reason, too: putting the blame in the right place. It may be a valuable programme, but is it a response to a problem they should never have had to solve in the first place? Ignoring the big picture risks glossing over the fact that someone else, for example the government or other authorities, is neglecting their responsibility.

This time, I want you to do an inventory of your newsroom’s reporting.

Set a reasonable timeframe for yourself and go through all the stories you’ve produced in, say, the past week or past month (whatever is realistic to do in no more than a couple of hours).

Make a note of which solutions ingredients are included in the stories. Don’t worry too much about getting it exactly right; this exercise is meant to help you look at the overall picture.

Can you spot any trends? Maybe your newsroom is already good at including evidence, or limitations, but the stories lack that extra bit of insight. What’s an easy way you can address this going forward? Does the newsroom need to think more actively about what the audience can learn from its stories – perhaps reporters need to ask different questions in interviews?

Pick a few stories that could have been good solutions stories but didn’t quite hit the mark, and dig more deeply into them. Why did they fall short? What strategies that we’ve discussed so far in this newsletter course could have been used to make them more solutions-focused?

You can use this template if you want, or whatever works best for you.

A massive overhaul of our newsroom is nice but unrealistic for many. For most of us, we grow and develop by tweaking our coverage, bit by bit. The goal of this exercise is to give you an idea of where to start tweaking. You may discover that your newsroom already uses more solutions ingredients than you thought. And if the foundation is there – it’s time to start building.

In many countries, midwives and emergency caesareans have mostly eradicated obstetric fistula – one of the most serious childbirth injuries which often results in severe incontinence.

But in rural parts of poorer countries, such as in Madagascar where this news report by the BBC is set, it’s still prevalent and the cause of great distress and pain to the women affected.

This news report is 4 minutes and 42 seconds, and still manages to explain in detail:

Watch the report to get an idea of and learn to identify how the four pillars of solutions journalism can be included in a short news report even if they’re only briefly mentioned.

Coming up with changes is one thing, but you need glue to make them stick. 

We’ve now gone through the four pillars of solutions journalism and how to incorporate them in your newsroom’s reporting. In the next edition, we’re going to work on a mini project plan to identify how the players of your newsroom fit into the implementation of a future solutions strategy.