NEW YORK — Journalist David Bornstein had enough of bad news. As co-author of the New York Times “Fixes” column and founder of dowser.org (a news site that covers successes in social innovation) Bornstein has reported on social problems from within one of the most prestigious newsrooms in the United States.
Day after day, news outlets turn out stories about catastrophe, social inequality and poverty worldwide—all with seemingly no traces of a solution. Journalists, especially at a paper as renowned as the New York Times, Bornstein thought, could do better.
In 2013, with the help of fellow journalists and authors Courtney Martin and Tina Rosenberg, he co-founded the Solutions Journalism Network, an organization dedicated to “rigorous, and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.”
“It’s not so much about people doing terrible things that are hidden from view,” Bornstein said in the New York Times Opinionator column. “It’s about people doing remarkable things that are hidden from view.”
“Obviously we think that solutions should be investigated and examined more often in the news,” Bornstein said. “But we recognize that journalists also have to be especially mindful to avoid reporting that could be construed as advocacy.”
What does solutions journalism look like in practice? In part, it involves a concept called positive deviance, which in this case, is a type of investigative reporting that searches for positive outliers and then answers the “how and why” questions behind them.
These pieces have the potential to create more than just good news; they can create real change.
For example, in collaboration with the Seattle Times, the Solutions Journalism Network worked on a series on public education in Washington State and the Pacific Northwest. Instead of reporting statistics on dropout rates, defunct standardized testing and scandals within teachers unions, the series highlighted Rainier Beach High School’s “gamble programs” that raised graduation rates by 25 percent and increased the completion of Advanced Placement (AP) credits.
When Claudia Rowe of the Seattle Times wrote her article, “Stunning Surge in Graduation Rate as Rainier Beach Gamble Pays Off,” the school’s advanced curriculum was about to exhaust its initial funding. Without a new spike in funds, the Seattle Public Schools system would be forced to discontinue the landmark program.
Two weeks after the release of the article, the school collected more than $10,000 in private donations according to Rowe’s follow-up article.
The Solutions Journalism Network has now expanded its reach to several different newsrooms across the U.S. including The Boston Globe and The Detroit Free Press.
While not a news network in itself, the network operates as the primary advocate for disseminating the doctrine of solutions-oriented reporting.
“What Bernstein is actually doing is essentially saying ‘Let’s find the problem solvers and let’s do traditional journalism stories about them,” Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Center for Civic Media said to NeimanReports. “Let’s look at them with caution and scrutiny. Let’s evaluate their claims.”
Sources: Nieman Reports, Solutions Journalism, Seattle Times
Photo: Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting