Reading: Yes / No / Not Given: Question 5

A style of reporting known as solutions journalism has gained ground in newsrooms over the past decade, encouraging reporters not merely to document a social problem but to investigate, with the same rigour applied to any other story, responses to that problem that appear to be working somewhere, and why. Critics within the profession have occasionally dismissed the approach as a form of good-news dressing, more concerned with making readers feel better than with holding power to account. I think this criticism misunderstands what the better examples of solutions journalism actually do, and I want to defend the genre against the charge that it is inherently softer or less rigorous than conventional investigative reporting.

A well-executed solutions story does not simply celebrate an initiative; it interrogates the evidence behind a claimed success as sceptically as an investigative reporter would interrogate a claim of wrongdoing; it asks what the intervention cost, who evaluated it, whether the results have been replicated elsewhere, and what trade-offs or failures accompanied it. Done properly, this is demanding, resource-intensive reporting, not a cheaper alternative to the accountability journalism that solutions coverage is sometimes accused of displacing. I am persuaded that newsrooms which frame coverage exclusively around what has gone wrong, without ever examining what has been tried in response, leave readers with an inaccurate picture of a problem's tractability, one that can foster the sense that nothing can be done, a conclusion that is very often untrue and that I believe contributes measurably to public disengagement from civic life.

I would nonetheless caution against one genuine risk: a newsroom under commercial pressure to produce upbeat, shareable content could use the solutions label to justify stories that skip the interrogation stage entirely, reporting a claimed success without checking it, and that failure mode would deserve every criticism levelled at the softer version of the genre. Whether solutions journalism becomes a rigorous complement to traditional reporting or a marketing label attached to uncritical coverage depends, in my view, less on the concept itself than on whether individual newsrooms enforce the same evidentiary standard on solutions stories that they already apply, or claim to apply, to every other kind of story they publish.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. The writer believes solutions journalism, as practised at its best, is inherently less rigorous than investigative reporting.
2. The writer states that a well-executed solutions story questions the evidence behind a claimed success as sceptically as an investigative reporter would question a claim of wrongdoing.
3. The writer believes coverage that focuses exclusively on what has gone wrong gives readers an accurate picture of a problem.
4. The writer thinks a sense that "nothing can be done" about a social problem is usually an accurate assessment.
5. The writer acknowledges a genuine risk that some newsrooms could use the solutions label to justify unchecked, uncritical stories.
6. The writer names a specific news organisation that has misused the solutions journalism label.
7. The writer believes whether solutions journalism succeeds depends mainly on the evidentiary standards individual newsrooms enforce.