Fighting Against the Machine: Inside a Solutions Journalism Campaign in UK Local Newsrooms

Abstract

There is growing momentum behind the solutions journalism (SOJO) movement, with news organizations across the world increasingly embedding news reporting practices on how people respond to social problems. Previous research suggests that SOJO has potential to reconfigure relationships between news audiences and journalists, while simultaneously opening new revenue streams. But what impediments might SOJO face in fast-paced and resource-poor newsroom contexts, especially those that serve local audiences? Following a year-long campaign where we helped introduce SOJO into 47 UK local news titles, we begin to answer this question, based on interviews with eight SOJO mentors, 17 journalists and 10 editors, alongside observations from mentors’ fora. While journalists saw many benefits to the practice, we outline several impediments to the successful implementation of SOJO in local media, including time and workflow, metrics and institutional rewards, and editorial commitment. Further, we identify the emergence of a pragmatic form of that we call “SOJO lite”; characterized as news that contains elements of solutions journalism but falls short of the widely used definitions suggested by industry leaders. Both findings have implications for the future direction of this emergent journalism practice.

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