Guidance for Teaching Written Solutions Journalism

It’s helpful to share multiple examples of written story structures that are relevant to the stories your students are working on.

One common and effective structure begins with an anecdotal lede that drops readers into the world of the response — often by introducing a character who is experiencing the response and/or a person implementing the response — followed by a brief explanation of the problem. The rest of the story is a chronological “howdunit” through which readers learn how the response came about and how it was implemented. Evidence of effectiveness, limitations and insights can be included throughout or provided at the end. Characters, action and description make the story engaging and bring the response to life.

A few tips for this type of structure: 

• The opening anecdote should ideally include some action.
• The person experiencing the response should be portrayed through an equity lens as someone with agency, not a victim of circumstances.
• The explanation of the problem should correspond to the scale of the response. In other words, if the response is a program that helps rural women in Maine obtain fresh produce and learn how to prepare healthy meals, the problem should be framed around lack of access to fresh food and healthy meals in rural areas.
• The chronology of the response in action can provide a nice “spine” for quotes, anecdotes and descriptions, as well as opportunities to provide evidence of effectiveness (quantitative and qualitative), acknowledge limitations and highlight insights. 
• Alternatively, limitations can come after the chronology in a section that might begin with some version of “To be sure …” 
• Insights can also come at the end in a section that addresses what was learned and what those seeking to replicate the response need to know.
• This structure also works well for a story documenting more than one response to a problem — for example, a comparison of how the same problem has been addressed in two different places. Commonly, covering more responses means going into less detail on each. 
   

For responses brought about by policy changes, one common structure begins with evidence of effectiveness, set in contrast to experiences in the past and/or in other places (the problem). The body of the story explains how the policy change came about, obstacles and all, and what the roll-out was like until and through the time when it achieved results. The challenge for this type of story is often finding characters and action. Interviews with people who pushed for and/or help enforce the policy change can be useful, as can talking with people who have been positively affected by it. With this structure, too, limitations and insights may be folded into the “howdunit” or included at the end.

A few tips for this type of structure:

• Avoid making the person who pushed for the policy change (whether that’s an advocate or a politician) the focus of the story. Instead, focus on the genesis and implementation of the policy.
• Look for ways to make the policy change in one place relevant elsewhere by finding insights that aid replicability in places where the response might not be championed by elected officials.
• Make sure that insights are provided by sources, data and observation, not by editorializing on the part of the writer.
• If the policy change is recent, be careful not to exaggerate its impact or assume it will continue under future leaders. (Susceptibility to the whims of elected officials may be a limitation worth addressing.)

There are many other story structure models available in the Solutions Story Tracker. Use “advanced search” to find stories that focus on particular issues, occur in specific places and are of various lengths. Selecting “student journalism” will enable you to choose stories that seem more accessible to your students.

How to teach this: Ask students to scour the Solutions Story Tracker for stories with a structure that provides a model for their own. For example, if their story looks at three different responses to a problem, find a story that does that; if their story is about a solution caused by a change in policy, find a story about how a new policy caused positive results.

Tip: Students may have trouble thinking about structure separately from topic. They’re likely to look for stories that are about the same problem or issue rather than stories that have a structure that would work for their response. Encourage them to explicitly find stories that are not on a topic closely related  to their own and to focus on the storytelling, not the topic.