One recent story that qualified for the Solution Journalism Network’s Story Tracker database documented how well a four-day work week has worked out for Iceland.
Photo of Reykjavik by Shunyu Fan: Getty Images
The Solutions Journalism Network may be just what you need.
Before it was shorthand for the scourge/salve that is social media, “social” referred to society, as in “people living together in organized communities with shared laws, traditions and values,” says Britannica.
Journalism often focuses on the problems in that society. Even when things are taking a turn for the better, a certain brand of journalism (some would say the best kind) can be counted on to keep picking at the scab.
But there’s a different approach I learned more about at the recent Higher Education Media Fellowship symposium convened by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars in Durham, North Carolina. It’s called solutions journalism, promulgated by the Solutions Journalism Network, founded in New York City in 2013 to advance “rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.”
Key elements to SJ stories include a focus on a response to the problem; insight into what can be learned from that response (and why it matters); evidence of the response’s effectiveness (or lack thereof) and context, i.e., limitations and shortcomings of the response.
Among the unexpected benefits of the approach, said Trisha Powell Crain, senior education reporter with Alabama Daily New & Alabama Public Television, is a shift in how journalistic success is defined. But the ultimate benefit is trust.
“Once people realized I was going to produce solutions stories regularly,” she said in Durham, “I gained their trust.” Which has led to a growing network of sources and even pitches from those sources. “I realized success is in the trying. The fact that people still try sometimes still surprises me. There are people still trying to improve outcomes for kids.”
After she pursued a story about middle school math coaches in a rural district, she said, “I got a random call from a school system superintendent in a north Alabama district. He’d never called me before. I’d actually done a story that was pretty not happy about things in his district. He said, ‘We reviewed your article about middle school math coaches and we’re going to try it here.’ He said, ‘I know you probably don’t get calls like this often.’ ”
For a beat reporter, that kind of warm and fuzzy feeling can be a rare reward in a field of discouragement and negativity. But solutions journalism is by no means soft. “We call solutions journalism ‘hope with teeth,’ ” says the SJN’s mission statement. “Research shows that when news reveals what’s working (or promising), it elevates the tone of public discourse, making it less divisive and more constructive; allows communities to see better options; and builds agency and hope.”
Investigative journalist and data analyst Matthew Kauffman put it into perspective in Durham: “I semi-retired in 2018, woke up a free man and three men woke up in prison because of my writing, so no one can accuse me of not being a hard-hitting journalist,” he said. He was 100% skeptical of solutions journalism, but came around, seeing like others that responses to problems are as newsworthy as the problems themselves.
Responses In Places
What does this have to do with Site Selection’s niche of location decision-making? Just as we track the geography of corporate facility investment projects in the Conway Projects Database, the Solutions Journalism Network tracks published stories in its Solutions Story Tracker, a curated database containing 16,900 stories produced by 9,500 journalists and 2,100 news outlets from 97 countries. The stories cover responses in 199 countries in 16 languages.
As soon as I heard that it existed, my natural question was “Where are the most responses occurring?” Within the week I was on the phone with Lita Tirak, manager of product for the Solutions Journalism Network and one of the first story vetters hired by the organization when it started building Story Tracker in 2016. She walked me through the detailed and plentiful parameters of the database, which allows sorting by criteria such as issue area, institution leading the response, news outlet and length of story. There’s even a “Staff Picks” section that includes stories about an effort to refreeze melting Arctic ice; a federal program backing electric school buses; and new approaches to U.S. Army recruiting in a divided nation.
I asked Tirak for the straight numbers. Which countries and which regions had the most responses addressed in those 16,900+ stories? Here they are:
Top 25 Countries (and ties) by Number of Solutions Journalism Stories in Story Tracker
| Country by Response location | Stories |
| United States | 11,002 |
| Nigeria | 613 |
| India | 468 |
| Canada | 333 |
| Kenya | 288 |
| United Kingdom | 236 |
| Germany | 204 |
| France | 186 |
| Brazil | 146 |
| Uganda | 131 |
| Australia | 127 |
| Mexico | 124 |
| South Korea | 99 |
| Netherlands | 96 |
| England | 93 |
| Bangladesh | 89 |
| Rwanda | 87 |
| Costa Rica | 81 |
| South Africa | 79 |
| Colombia | 79 |
| Denmark | 76 |
| Italy | 75 |
| Spain | 70 |
| Sweden | 65 |
| Nepal | 57 |
| China | 57 |
Top 25 Cities by Number of Solutions Journalism Stories in Story tracker
| City of Response | Stories |
| New York, New York, United States | 582 |
| Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States | 391 |
| Chicago, Illinois, United States | 279 |
| Los Angeles, California, United States | 262 |
| San Francisco, California, United States | 229 |
| Seattle, Washington, United States | 207 |
| Detroit, Michigan, United States | 167 |
| Washington, District of Columbia, United States | 145 |
| Oakland, California, United States | 132 |
| Denver, Colorado, United States | 124 |
| Boston, Massachusetts, United States | 127 |
| Baltimore, Maryland, United States | 111 |
| Cleveland, Ohio, United States | 117 |
| Portland, Oregon, United States | 95 |
| Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States | 86 |
| New Orleans, Louisiana, United States | 67 |
| Atlanta, Georgia, United States | 63 |
| Tucson, Arizona, United States | 68 |
| San Diego, California, United States | 60 |
| Houston, Texas, United States | 61 |
| Dallas, Texas, United States | 60 |
| St. Louis, Missouri, United States | 53 |
| Sacramento, California, United States | 59 |
| Austin, Texas, United States | 54 |
| Phoenix, Arizona, United States | 60 |
I also asked for the numbers and stories involving economic development or business. Just like that, Tirak produced two spreadsheets with story links and column after column of tracked aspects of those stories. I learned from the data sets that 25% of the entire database involves stories that touch on economic development and mobility, while 1,648 stories address responses involving business and industry themes — a May 2024 story from Bloomberg CityLab called “St. Louis Fills a Downtown Void With Soccer” or a May 2023 piece from Financial Times on seaweed farming in Sweden. Environmental sustainability? More than 3,380 stories, including an April story from the Christian Science Monitor about how bitcoin is driving green energy in Kenya.
While the cities might be expected to correlate with the presence of large populations as well as large media contingents, some smaller cities appear rather high on the list.
As with any data collection effort, there are caveats and there is continuous improvement. Story Tracker’s origins included a large number of stories from major news organizations on both U.S. coasts, so the team worked to cultivate a more geographically diverse base of outlets as well as more diversity by type of outlet. Yes, The New York Times will always be there. But so are publications such as Grist, Reasons To Be Cheerful, Stateline, AfroLA, Texas Monthly, Civil Eats and education publication The Hechinger Report.
Gradually the database has curated more stories in more languages, stretching its scope to more parts of the world. And with a surfeit of stories that could claim to be about solutions writ large, Story Tracker has had to pivot its strategy in order to set reasonable limits. “We have increased focus on global local news outlets, smaller-medium sized ones and those that are community serving,” a slide deck explains. “We have prioritized high quality and equity stories over just any stories, so fewer stories are coming to us for vetting.”
Ah, but there are plenty of stories still flowing in from communities around the world, human stories vetted by human beings. Explore the database at your own risk: In a world pummeled with alleged news, you may discover all the stories you’ve been missing — and all the new directions those stories can take you.
