Solutions Journalism: Strategies for Effecting and Managing Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The field of journalism is undergoing epic changes at this time. With the growing impact of social media and citizen journalism, among other trends, traditional schools of journalism face a need to re-examine their most fundamental premises. Historically journalists adopted a code of practice whereby the ideal news article focused on issues and problems of consequence to society, and reporters presented both sides of the case. The gold standard was balanced reporting that investigated and uncovered abuses in society, with the mantra being “if it bleeds, it leads.”. There was no added incentive or requirement to take responsibility for solving the problems they uncovered. While print media organizations faced a backlash of criticism following the era of “yellow journalism,” they did not confront the necessity to reorient the entire profession; rather they simply had to “clean up their act” and operationalize what they already knew and believed. Today, the situation is dramatically different—largely as a consequence of the rise of citizen journalism, the impact of social media, and the trend toward an introspective look at their profession by journalists themselves and by those who train the journalists. In this article, we look at the emerging focus on a phenomenon called solutions journalism. Solutions journalism differs in both form and intent from not only the traditional standard of reporting, which focuses on problems, but also “good news reporting,” which tends to be superficial and non-solution oriented. In an effort to understand the current push for a new direction in the journalism profession, we will look at the rise of the new paradigm, pioneers in solutions journalism, characteristics of solutions journalism, and the theoretical foundations of solutions journalism. In exploring the latter point, we will examine the relationships among solutions journalism, social media, open source, systems, and open innovation theories.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".