The Advocates of Solutions Journalism: Proponents and Organizations

Most journalism has historically been drawn to what goes wrong – the scandal, the crisis, the collapse. But a growing movement within the profession asks a sharper question: what’s actually working, and why? This is the core impulse behind solutions journalism, and the advocates who champion it are not idealists softening the news – they are seasoned reporters and well-resourced organizations making a rigorous case for a more complete form of storytelling. Understanding who these advocates are, what they argue, and which media institutions have adopted their approach reveals how profoundly this movement is reshaping modern journalism.

Championing evidence-based reporting 🔗

At the heart of solutions journalism is a straightforward but frequently misunderstood argument: reporting on responses to social problems is not “good news” journalism or advocacy – it is accountability journalism done more completely. Proponents contend that solutions journalism is critical and clear-eyed reporting that investigates and explains existing credible responses to social problems, examining what is working, how it is working, and crucially, where it is falling short.

This distinction matters because the biggest obstacle solutions journalism faces within newsrooms is the fear of being perceived as advocates or cheerleaders. SJN’s basic toolkit directly confronts this fear, arguing that journalists compromise their professionalism not by covering solutions, but by failing to cover them. The argument rests on a fundamental duty: if journalism’s purpose is to hold an accurate mirror up to society, then ignoring how communities respond to problems produces a distorted and incomplete picture.

Evidence, not optimism, is what separates solutions journalism from feel-good content. Solutions stories are built around four core elements: they focus on a response to a social problem; they show what can be learned from that response; they include evidence of whether the response worked or not; and they explain the limitations and barriers involved. This evidence-based framework is what advocates argue inherently guards against bias – a reporter following the data wherever it leads, including toward failure, is not advocating for anything.

Research has also reinforced the case for this approach from the audience side. A 2008 study by the Associated Press found that young people were growing fatigued with news they perceived as relentlessly negative and unresolved, leading them to disengage from media entirely. Solutions journalism advocates cite this finding frequently, arguing that the practice is not just ethically sounder – it is also more useful and more likely to retain public trust.

The role of the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) 🔗

No organization has done more to formalize, fund, and spread solutions journalism than the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). Founded in 2013, it is an independent, non-profit organization whose stated mission is to lead a global shift in journalism by advancing rigorous reporting about how people try to solve problems and what can be learned from their successes and failures. The network describes its work with a memorable phrase: “hope with teeth.”

The founders and their path to SJN 🔗

SJN was co-founded by David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg, veteran reporters who co-wrote the “Fixes” column at The New York Times, and Courtney E. Martin, a journalist and author whose career began just as online media was expanding rapidly. The three co-founders came from markedly different reporting environments – farmlands in India, hospitals in Brazil, neighborhoods in post-Katrina New Orleans – yet arrived at the same conclusion: journalism was producing almost no competitive coverage of responses to social problems.

In 2010, Rosenberg and Bornstein launched the “Fixes” column in The New York Times opinion section, exploring how people and institutions were tackling social problems more effectively than the norm. The column was built around what Bornstein calls “positive deviants” – organizations or individuals achieving better outcomes on a given issue than their peers – and it became a widely read model of solutions reporting over its eleven-year run. The strong reader response to “Fixes” gave Bornstein and Rosenberg the confidence to co-found SJN alongside Martin, with a mission to take solutions journalism from a single column into mainstream newsroom practice.

Tina Rosenberg brings particular weight to the advocacy effort. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Rosenberg has been both a public voice of SJN and a co-author of the “Fixes” column, lending the organization significant journalistic credibility. David Bornstein, who serves as CEO of SJN, has consistently pushed back against the comparison between solutions journalism and the “civic journalism” movement of the 1990s, which was widely criticized as partisan – arguing that the evidence-based approach of solutions journalism is what distinguishes the two practices.

How SJN operates and advocates 🔗

SJN’s global network includes trained journalists, fellows, accredited trainers, university hubs, and a Learning Lab with extensive resources. Its Solutions Story Tracker® is now the largest repository of solutions journalism in the world, comprising over 17,500 stories from more than 9,900 journalists across 2,200 news outlets in 102 countries. This scale demonstrates that solutions journalism has moved well beyond a single organization’s advocacy effort into a genuine global practice.

SJN provides newsrooms with workshops, research assistance, data tools, and modest travel funding to support solutions-oriented projects. The organization has also trained over 15,000 journalists through live and online programmes, and has engaged with more than 200 news organizations to embed solutions reporting into their editorial cultures. On the academic side, SJN has partnered with Temple University’s School of Media and Communication to develop journalism courses, and collaborated with the Poynter Institute to produce a free interactive online course in solutions journalism – extending its influence from working newsrooms into the next generation of journalists.

Global adoption by news organizations 🔗

SJN’s advocacy would mean little if news organizations weren’t actually changing their practice. The evidence suggests they are – across different media types, ownership models, and geographic contexts.

Print media: the Boston Globe and the Seattle Times 🔗

SJN’s first major project was a collaboration with The Seattle Times to produce a year-long, solutions-oriented series on public education called Education Lab, which was extended for a second year due to its impact. The project drew early scrutiny because its primary funder, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, held a controversial position on education policy – a tension that SJN and the Times addressed by being transparent from the outset about who was funding the work. This transparency itself became a model for how solutions journalism can acknowledge its funding environment without compromising editorial independence.

The Boston Globe, one of America’s most respected newspapers, has also been part of the SJN network’s collaborations. SJN has worked with the Globe as part of its network of news organizations committed to producing solutions-oriented reporting projects. The Globe’s involvement is significant because of the paper’s strong tradition of deep investigative journalism – its participation signals that solutions journalism is not seen as a departure from serious reporting, but as a complement to it.

Public radio: PRI’s The World and beyond 🔗

Solutions journalism has found a particularly natural home in public radio, where mission-driven journalism is already embedded in the institutional culture. SJN has collaborated with The World, a radio programme distributed by the Public Radio Exchange (formerly co-produced by Public Radio International), as well as KPCC, a public radio station in Los Angeles, and the Detroit Free Press, to build solutions-oriented coverage focused on health and violence.

PRI’s mission was explicitly to serve audiences as a distinctive content source for information and insights essential to understanding a diverse, interconnected world – a mandate that aligns closely with the goals of solutions journalism. The World’s global scope made it an effective vehicle for showing how responses to social problems in one country might offer lessons to audiences in another, which is precisely the kind of comparative, evidence-based reporting that solutions journalism encourages.

Investigative journalism and the Center for Investigative Reporting 🔗

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is among the major media entities that have embraced solutions-oriented approaches, alongside the Christian Science Monitor and other outlets in SJN’s collaborative network. The CIR is notable because its involvement challenges the assumption that solutions journalism and hard investigative reporting operate in separate spheres. PRX teamed with the Center for Investigative Reporting to debut Reveal, the first syndicated investigative news programme on public radio, consistently recognized as a source of groundbreaking reporting that sparked civic action. The inclusion of investigative newsrooms in the solutions journalism movement reflects a broader understanding that exposing a problem and reporting on credible responses to it are not opposing journalistic acts – they are two halves of the same complete story.

Criticisms and the debate over bias 🔗

Solutions journalism has not escaped criticism, and its advocates are candid about the tensions involved. Some readers and journalists have argued that the approach is inherently biased toward positive framings, while others have welcomed it as a more constructive alternative to problem-only reporting. The charge of bias is one that SJN takes seriously, which is why its framework is built on evidence – stories must include data or qualitative results demonstrating whether a response is actually working, and must acknowledge failures and limitations alongside any successes.

Bornstein has acknowledged that journalists face a genuine historical bias toward stories of corruption and scandal, and a reasonable concern about being perceived as advocates. His response is not to dismiss those concerns but to reframe them: the goal is not to celebrate solutions but to investigate them with the same skepticism applied to problems. Solutions journalism, as SJN defines it, does not proclaim what “should” be done, does not exhort readers to sign petitions or donate money, and does not portray any response as a silver bullet. What it does is apply standard journalistic rigour to a category of news – credible responses to social problems – that has historically been undercovered.

The funding question also demands ongoing vigilance. The Seattle Times-Gates Foundation example demonstrated both the risk and the possible remedy: transparency. When the sources of funding for solutions journalism projects are disclosed clearly, readers are able to weigh the information with full context – the same standard applied to any sponsored journalism.

What do you think? If evidence-based reporting on responses to social problems reduces public disengagement with the news, does that obligation to engage audiences change what journalists owe their readers – or should editorial decisions remain independent of audience outcomes? And can a newsroom maintain genuine editorial independence when solutions journalism projects are funded by foundations with specific policy positions on the issues being covered?

References

1. https://americanpressinstitute.org/moving-toward-whole-story-9-good-questions-david-bornstein-solutions-journalism-network/
2. https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/learning-lab/toolkits-guides/basic-toolkit
3. https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/who-we-are/mission
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutions_journalism
5. https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/who-we-are
6. https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/david-bornstein-s-lessons-in-solutions-journalism/s2/a903424/
7. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/solutions-journalism-network/
8. https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutions_Journalism_Network
10. https://skoll.org/organization/public-radio-international/
11. https://www.prx.org/20anniversary