Our Impact in 2016
Curriculum
SJN’s curriculum is the foundation of all we do. Our tools and other resources explain what solutions journalism is, why it matters, when to make use of it, how it fits into the theory and evolution of journalism, and how it connects to the emerging interest around news engagement and media impact. It provides an accessible explanation of the craft, with specific modules aimed at beats, issue areas, and different media. Our approach has been to disseminate We have disseminated this intelligence in easily accessible products, through channels that can reach a wide variety of journalists, journalism students and teachers, and others who will help drive a practice shift in media.
Core curriculum products: Our flagship learning product, the Solutions Journalism Toolkit, available for free via the SJN website, has been viewed by over 7,000 people in more than 120 countries. We’ve also created a resource for editors and one for education reporters – the first in what will be a series of issue-based guides.
Journalism school outreach: We’ve also launched a framework for teaching solutions reporting in journalism schools, producing instruction guides for a full-semester stand-alone course – piloted initially at Temple University – and for a shorter module that can be dropped into existing courses, first used by Arizona State University across its intermediate reporting classes. Holly Wise, a journalist-entrepreneur and a faculty member at Texas State University, has led our effort to bring the solutions approach into journalism school courses. By the end of 2016, SJN had forged relationships with 22 j-schools. We now know of solutions journalism courses either underway or in the works at Kent State University (taught by Rachel Dissell of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, one of our newsroom partners), the University of West Virginia (with Nancy Andrews, a former partner at the Detroit Free Press), Muhlenberg College, the University of Florida, Arizona State University, San Francisco State University, the University of Oregon, and Temple University – which, with our assistance, has created a chair in “Media, Cities, and Solutions.” Holly has been a visiting professor in residence for stints at the University of Colorado – Boulder and at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.
TOPLINE STATS
8,815 people joined in a live training or used our online training resources
38 news organizations participated in our core training workshops
6 journalism schools integrated the solutions approach into course curricula
Cofounders Tina Rosenberg and David were featured in podcasts at Chronicle of Philanthropy and How Do We Fix It?
WhatWe’veLearned
We have mostly completed the task of codifying what we know about solutions journalism. So our future investment will focus on harvesting and disseminating learning from our growing network
Where We’reHeaded in 2017
SJN will consolidate its curriculum products into the Learning Lab, a dedicated platform at solutionsjournalism.org that will integrate all our toolkits – with new guides for engagement and reporting on health and violence – into a single resource that our members can navigate in nearly infinite ways, at their own pace, to suit their needs. We’ll translate core resources into different languages, beginning with Spanish and French, and later Arabic and Chinese, to help extend our reach outside the U.S.
