The Keys To Powerful Solutions Journalism Center For Media Engagement

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 18, 2025, 8:29 AM

the keys to powerful solutions journalism center for media engagement

Solutions journalism offers comprehensive coverage of an issue by proposing solutions rather than just focusing on the problem. The Center for Media Engagement set out to determine how certain components of solutions journalism affect the way readers evaluate both the reporting and the issue. We found that stories covering several core components of solutions journalism: Solutions journalism strives to include what is sometimes overlooked: reporting not just about the problems facing society, but about how communities respond to them. The Center for Media Engagement previously found that readers of solutions journalism feel more informed, optimistic, and interested in engaging with an issue. But solutions journalism is about more than stating a possible solution to a problem.

This study, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with contributions from The Impact Architects, breaks down solutions journalism into five core components: This project sought to understand the value of reporting on these components and to determine whether certain components are more powerful in affecting readers’ attitudes. Articles that included all five components of solutions journalism: When it comes to solutions journalism, the more information you can provide readers, the better. Adding additional components beyond the problem and the solution (i.e. implementation, results, and insights) can bolster positive responses to your work.

Readers who are given all five components feel more positive about the issue, rate the article as higher quality, and are more likely to “like” a similar article on Facebook. Reading articles with all five components also inspired heightened interest in the issue and more of a willingness to read future articles about the issue. This could be especially useful for news organizations trying to attract loyal readers to a reporting series. Solutions journalism offers comprehensive coverage of an issue by proposing solutions rather than just focusing on the problem. The Center for Media Engagement set out to determine how certain components of solutions journalism affect the way readers evaluate both the reporting and the issue. Solutions journalism strives to include what is sometimes overlooked: reporting not just about the problems facing society, but about how communities respond to them.

The Center for Media Engagement previously found that readers of solutions journalism feel more informed, optimistic, and interested in engaging with an issue. But solutions journalism is about more than stating a possible solution to a problem. How to use solutions reporting to create a platform for more constructive engagement. How to drive productive public discourse and online discussions to strengthen agency and innovation within the communities you serve. This toolkit is available in Polish. The content in this toolkit is free to repurpose.

All SJN Learning Lab content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Newsrooms everywhere are searching for ways to meaningfully connect and build relationships with their audiences. For many, this is an existential challenge, made more complicated by a media and information ecosystem increasingly vulnerable to misinformation, distrust, and divisiveness. Fatigued by negative news, some audiences are tuning out, no longer confident in the media’s capacity to reflect either the reality of their lives or the interests of their communities. Solutions journalism offers an opportunity to change that dynamic. Stories that better reflect the whole of a community – its problems and the responses to those problems – can create a platform for more constructive discussion, which in turn can lead to corrective...

In this way, there’s an organic and powerful interplay between solutions reporting and audience and community engagement. Cultivating and sustaining this sort of dialogue demands effort at a time when newsroom resources are ever more scarce. The good news: We know that audiences and communities desperately crave to participate in a new sort of conversation. They want constructive stories that help them take action against seemingly intractable problems. They want the tools and fora to talk across political, racial, and cultural divides. Journalism’s predominant theory of change is that pointing out social problems will spur reform.

Journalists act as whistleblowers and expose wrongdoing, but have little role to play beyond that. This doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did. “In the past there were many stories that pointed out the problem, but none used what was working elsewhere to remove the many local excuses that were preventing the conversation from moving from what... The only thing that ever came of previous stories was a politician or two talking about how bad the problem was.” People don’t change simply because you point out their problems. They need models for change.

So do societies. We need to know that it’s possible to do better – and that places like us, with no more resources than we have, ARE doing better. That’s what happened in Cleveland, Ohio, when reporters Brie Zeltner and Rachel Dissell wrote a series of stories about lead paint poisoning, focusing on how other cities were better protecting their children. This Engagement Guide will explore the connection between solutions journalism and engagement through a range of case studies that feature newsroom leaders speaking about their experience implementing various engagement mechanisms. The guide will describe tools, tactics, lessons learned, and best practices for audience and community engagement strategies and activities in service of solutions objectives. There are several ways to dig in.

You can enter through the diagnostic, which asks you to think about how engagement can advance your solutions journalism goals. Just click on a relevant objective, and you will be directed to relevant case studies that illustrate that impact in action. Alternatively, you may wish to directly access the case studies. The case studies are tagged by impact; note that case studies illustrate multiple impacts. The last section of this Guide is a set of engagement best practices that have emerged across our universe of newsroom partners, regardless of size, geography, or medium. These are intended to be a handy reference for reporters and editors as they go about designing their own activities and building them into newsroom practice.

Solutions Journalism is rigorous reporting about responses to society’s problems. It is complete journalism that not only spotlights the problems but follows an evidence-based presentation of existing solutions. Such reporting enhances knowledge and accountability by providing the whole story to readers and offers constructive content in an age of media apathy. This innovative journalism approach goes beyond simple issue identification and instead focuses on featuring what is already working. It uses the same rigor of investigative reporting to highlight the mechanisms and success factors as well as the limitations of already-existing solutions to well-known problems. As a result, it activates citizens by functioning as a catalyst for accountability that can lead to meaningful change.

A problem that was seen as unavoidable comes to be seen as unacceptable. Solutions Journalism covers a wide variety of topics and its approach ranges from identifying cases of positive deviants to exploring new ideas in action to reporting on experiments in progress. The result is informative, impactful content that strengthens audience engagement re-establishes trust in the media, and increases both readership and revenue. The Four Qualities of Solutions Journalism 1) A solutions story focuses on a RESPONSE to a social problem — and how that response has worked or why it hasn’t. (“howdunnit”)2) The best solutions reporting distills the lessons that makes the response relevant and accessible to others.

In other words, it offers INSIGHT.3) Solutions journalism looks for EVIDENCE — data or qualitative results that show effectiveness (or lack thereof).4) Discusses LIMITATIONS or gaps of the approach (no response is perfect!) You’ve probably heard the complaint: the news is just too negative. You can’t stop covering the bad stories, but you can give readers some of what they want – positive news coverage that focuses on solutions, not just the problem. We already know that solutions journalism can make people feel more informed, optimistic, and engaged in an issue. But what is it about solutions journalism that makes them feel this way? To find the answer, the Center for Media Engagement broke down solutions journalism into five core components, based on work from the Gates Foundation and Solutions Journalism Network:

The idea was to figure out which of these components had the greatest effect on readers. When you boil it all down, the answer is that the more information you can provide, the better. Articles with all five components are better for both the newsroom and the reader (more on that in a moment). However, some of our research suggests that adding components 3 to 5 only makes a difference if you invest in in-depth reporting on components 1 and 2. Essentially, it’s important for journalists to take the time to fully explain the problem and solution before exploring the other components.

The Keys To Powerful Solutions Journalism Center For Media Engagement

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