Sources and Interviews for Solutions Stories

Solutions journalism centers responses to problems, so it’s essential to interview sources who are involved in the response. Ideally, this should include people involved in creating and implementing the response as well as people benefiting from the response. These people are best positioned to explain how the response works, in detail, and also help identify some of the evidence of effectiveness, limitations and insights.

People involved in the response can help drive the narrative of the story as the audience watches the response unfold. But they should be characters, not the focus of the story. (See “How to steer clear of creating impostor stories” above.) Also, it’s important that the people benefiting from the response not be cast as victims of the problem or passive recipients of help. They are people with lived experience of the problem and the response, and the wisdom that comes from their perspective on both. They are likely to provide rich anecdotal evidence of the response’s effectiveness and limitations because they have firsthand knowledge of them.

Solutions stories also benefit from at least one source with a “30,000-foot view”: someone who is well-informed about the problem and about responses to it, but who is not directly involved in the specific response. This could be a scholar, a policymaker or someone at an organization that focuses on the problem. This source can contextualize the response and provide a bigger-picture understanding of both the problem and response, and potentially comment on what distinguishes this response from others.

Interviewing for solutions stories aims to elicit the “howdunit” of the response — the details of what the response looks like in action. It also aims to surface evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, as well as limitations and insights. For that reason, it’s helpful to coach students on how to ask the types of questions that elicit all four pillars. These can include (but aren’t limited to):

• How did this response get started?
• Can you walk me through how it works, step by step?
• When did you know it was working — and how?
• Is there any data to support that?
• What has the response been unable to achieve — not fully, or not yet?
• What do your critics say?
• What did you learn along the way that helped you refine the response?
• What would someone seeking to replicate your success benefit from knowing?

Because solutions stories are about responses to social problems, students benefit from developing a set of interviewing techniques that surface deeper truths about people and communities and the issues they face: Complicating the Narratives. SJN’s Complicating the Narratives Toolkit offers questions and exercises to help students develop their interview skills. Looping, in particular, is highly useful for students seeking to garner the trust of the people they are interviewing and ensure accurate understanding of what they are being told.

Other great resources for interviewing include the Listening Post Collective, which has a playbook for connecting and listening in communities, and Hearken, which offers audience engagement strategies for building trust and learning what is working in communities.

How to teach this: Ask students to come up with a story about a time when they achieved something difficult that required numerous steps from initiation through execution. Then pair them up and have them practice getting all the details from each other and writing a “howdunit” about each achievement. Students can also practice “looping”— a key Complicating the Narratives technique  — with one another. The toolkit has numerous prompts.

Tip: Before asking your students to try looping, teach them how to do it and demonstrate it with a colleague or a willing student.