Impact Stories

The Charlotte Journalism Collaborative, comprising six news outlets and three community institutions in North Carolina, is working with local visual artists to translate its reporting into creative formats to engage new audiences. A $9,000 grant from Charlotte’s Arts & Science Council, for example, helped the collaborative produce a graphic novel highlighting stories of the pandemic. Chris Rudisill, the collaborative's director, said the project opened up opportunities for journalists to collaborate with artists and “help bridge the gap between local news and the public.” Artist Wolly McNair said the project “is a game changer and hopefully will be something others use to model ways they can tell stories."

After the Beacon's Managing Editor, Smriti Jacob, participated in SJN's pilot Complicating the Narratives (CTN) training, she incorporated a CTN lens in her coverage. According to Jacob, the stories crafted using this deep-listening practice helped diversify the Beacon’s audience and drew interest from freelancers, especially journalists of color. Jacob said the Beacon has had “a big gain in diverse readership” in 2020. “I've had Black journalists contact me to write for us, to freelance for us. That comes from the nuanced stories,” she said.

Washington City Paper tracked the people who participated in its solutions-focused Voters Guide project, finding that they were more engaged than other readers. Participants were the people who responded when the paper asked its audience to name the issues that were most important to them, published the answers in its voters guide and then followed up with some solutions reporting on those issues. Since the guide was published, participants who were not already Washington City Paper members were twice as likely to become members as nonparticipating newsletter subscribers. The rate at which this group opened the paper’s newsletters also increased significantly.

Minority Africa, a digital publication based in Kampala, Uganda, received a commitment for a grant totaling $32,000 from the Innovation Center at the Aga Khan University of Nairobi, Kenya. Caleb Okereke, Minority Africa’s founder and managing editor, said solutions journalism was featured prominently in the application process. He said that covering minorities in Africa with a solutions focus is a key part of what Minority Africa does and was of interest to the funders.

The Local, a multiregional English-language digital news publisher in Europe, trained 100 experienced and early career journalists (including students) from 20 countries to apply the solutions lens to reporting on migration using the Solution Journalism Network’s online resources and curriculum. Over a dozen stories from the project are now available in SJN’s Solutions Story Tracker.

Employees of Nice-Matin saved the newspaper from bankruptcy in 2015 by becoming cooperative owners and launching a solutions journalism desk. In 2019, subscriptions had climbed 600% in three years, with solutions articles driving twice the number of subscriber conversions and keeping readers engaged three times longer compared with other content. Journalist Sophie Casals told the Membership Puzzle Project that solutions journalism led people “back to news” and increased reader trust.