Impact Stories

Close to 600 people have completed a seven-day course on public records sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative with help from Cleveland Documenters. The course offered a daily, bite-size “micro-lesson” via text message along with
exercises to help users apply what they had learned. One group in Cleveland — parents whose children were victims of gun violence — has used the course to request local homicide data, and they hope to present a map of every homicide in their county to the City of Cleveland’s safety committee. “There’s this notion that people are apathetic,” said Rachel Dissell, a Cleveland-based journalist who designed the course with editor and educator Linda Austin. “But the more we work with people, it’s more like people are frustrated. ... Really, people want to solve problems — they don’t know how.”

A spokeswoman for a sewer district in northeast Ohio credited a solutions journalism story with helping double the number of low-income renters who signed up for a program aimed at helping them pay their sewer bills. The story was part of the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative’s “Making Ends Meet” project (https://www.neosojo.com/), and was published by Ideastream Public Media, which represents local television and radio stations.

After the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story that explained how Baby Bonds and 529 accounts were helping people in other states save money for college, a home and/or retirement, a group of Wisconsin lawmakers proposed a bill that would bring a similar investment savings program to their state.

Melissa Fleming, the U.N.’s undersecretary-general for global communications, announced that the U.N. will take a cue from the Solutions Journalism Network and highlight solutions as well as problems in its communications. “My job at the U.N. is to communicate the state of the world,” she wrote. “To do so I could tell any number of terrifying and attention-grabbing stories. But in the long run, I’d begin to lose people. I’m increasingly working on the premise that gloom doesn’t keep people gripped. Hope does.” The U.N.’s infusion of solutions will start at the top, she added. “When U.N. Secretary General António Guterres speaks, he highlights solutions while explaining problems, and then appeals to the world to join the response.”

Next City, a nonprofit newsroom in Philadelphia with a strong focus on solutions journalism, generated $115,000 in reader revenue in 2021, part of a trend of increasing audience support for the publication. Next City puts a priority on its solutions reporting and highlights it as part of its mission.

Red/Acción, an online publication in Argentina that specializes in “periodismo humano” (aka solutions journalism), recruited seven media organizations in seven other Latin American countries to experiment with a story-sharing network. When it launched, editor David Flier wrote that the news organizations “believe that sharing these kinds of stories, the experiences and knowledge they contain, helps us imagine better solutions.” The collaboration published and shared hundreds of stories (https://www.redaccion.com.ar/secciones/red-periodismo-humano/) throughout 2021.