Tina Rosenberg
Cofounder and VP of Innovation, Solutions Journalism Network
Pivoting from problems to covering their solutions
Tina Rosenberg is the cofounder and vice president of innovation for the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit training newsrooms on its namesake practice: the process of covering solutions to issues like public health, education, or criminal justice with rigor and without sounding like an advocate.
Rosenberg has been writing for the New York Times since 2010. She is also the author of three books, including “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1996.
She graduated from Northwestern’s journalism school in 1982 and says she got into the trade because her grandfather was an editor for a series of Yiddish newspapers in New York City.
By Robert Davis
When the Solutions Journalism Network started working with a local paper in Alabama in 2017, I asked people there, “What do you think about mainstream media coverage of Alabama?”
They said they hated it.
Why?
“Because journalists often come to Alabama and cover us as if we’re ignorant,” they told me. “We do a lot of things that don’t make us look ignorant, but you’re not interested in that.”
But that local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, didn’t realize they were doing the same thing in their own city. Montgomery is a majority-Black city, yet only the newspaper’s crime reporter went into the Black neighborhoods to cover stories. The Advertiser was giving their Black community the same kind of coverage that Alabama was receiving from the New York Times.
Since that conversation, the Advertiser has done a lot of “solutions” stories, and they’ve changed the way they cover Black Montgomery. For example, they published a story about Renaissance, a second-chance center for parolees in Montgomery and how it’s playing a role in reducing recidivism there. In another, the paper covered the impact of a state program designed to improve the learning experiences of children up to 4 years old who are from low-income households.
These kinds of stories have made the paper so much better — and to me, that’s the power of solutions journalism.
Our Communities Are Exhausted
For a long time, reporters have realized that our communities are exhausted from the steady diet of corruption, dysfunction, and failure that the news offers. It creates a distorted, unfair, and untrue narrative about marginalized communities. Even during the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was advising people to take breaks from the news. Many people have completely tuned out the news, and the negativity is by far the largest reason. It’s just bad for our mental health.
Whenever we talk to newsrooms about how to do solutions journalism, we rarely get any pushback and people are on board within minutes. But journalism can also be a defensive profession and there are a lot of newsrooms that are resistant to change, especially the way they’ve always covered their communities.
As my cofounder David Bornstein [journalist and author of the book “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas”] says, “We don’t want a situation where the doctor comes out of the operating room and announces ‘The surgery was a success, but the patient died.’”
Newsrooms need to stay alive in order to serve their community. But they face crises that are both financial and existential. Better journalism matters — but it might not be enough to save us.
A Powerful Tool
I think journalists have been afraid to write about solutions because they haven’t wanted to fall under the categories of “advocacy” or “cheerleading.”
If you do real solutions journalism, it’s also hard-hitting and important journalism; not only that, it’s also easy to do.
If a school district releases school-performance data, our natural tendency as journalists is to find the worst-performing school and write a story about it. But why not write about the best-performing school that isn’t located in a wealthy community? Look at the positive data as well as the negative.
If you do real solutions journalism, it’s also hard-hitting and important journalism; not only that, it’s also easy to do.
It also speaks to a bigger issue about trust in the media. When journalists do investigative work, other journalists see it as an expression of love for their city because they’re talking about problems that need to be solved.
Non-journalists don’t see it that way. They see us as sitting on the sidelines sniping people, and that’s one reason why journalists get accosted. It’s baffling to journalists, but that’s the way some civilians see us. So it’s really important for journalists to show that we can cover legitimate news stories about what’s working.
The Question Reporters Should Be Asking
Doing solutions journalism starts by asking the question, “What’s being done to solve this problem?”
Let’s say you cover police corruption. The solutions story is not a piece about a cop who isn’t corrupt — I’d argue that isn’t a story at all. The solutions story is finding a police department that used to be corrupt and got rid of its corruption. That’s the kind of powerful story about systemic change that needs to be told.
While it really isn’t a tool for breaking news, solutions journalism works really well for feature and enterprise reporting. You may not be able to cover what happened today on the campaign trail through a solutions lens, but you can do stories about the promises that candidates make. For example, if a mayoral candidate proposes a social program, go to another community with a similar program and see how well it’s worked.
Solutions journalism also makes investigations more powerful because it takes away excuses. City leaders often react to an investigation by saying, “We’re doing the best we can to solve this terrible problem.” A solutions journalism framework would respond by comparing those efforts to other jurisdictions to see if the city leaders are telling the truth.
There are a lot of journalists who understand that we can’t keep doing our jobs the way we used to. It’s critically important for a newsroom’s relationship with its community. We have a lot of two- or three-person newsrooms that are doing solutions journalism in rural and underserved areas, but we need more of these newsrooms to get on board.