Abstract
What if we thought of journalism like farming? Both are ancient practices with potential to improve when people rethink business as usual to answer threshold questions: What needs are practitioners being asked to satisfy in a rapidly changing society? How might established practice in one endeavor benefit from expertise developed in seemingly unrelated areas?
Answers have led U.S. farmers over the past 25 years or so to innovate quickly. The result: Significantly increased productivity while keeping costs relatively stable. As the Department of Agriculture reported in 2017, farmers have benefited from knowledge borrowed from risk management and contracting. And while change is not always benign or even welcome, what has united thoughtful innovators and critics alike is a commitment to seeing their profession do better.
So it is with Bill Dodd, lecturer and researcher at the University of Tasmania, whose timely Solutions journalism (2021) draws on current research into hope, leadership, and the shifting nature of expertise to show how scholarship that at first may seem tangential can lead to best-practice newsgathering. As his introduction makes clear, reform is needed: Early months of the COVID-19 pandemic led mental health experts to warn that repeated “exposure” to reporting based on speculation was harmful. Citing a Reuters Institute report from 2019, Dodd (p. 3, 2021) notes the inverse relationship between journalism’s salutary role in civil society and legitimate criticism: Taken in steady doses, bad news can make us feel really bad. The conclusion leads Dodd (p. 3) to a series of questions whose answers have potential to re-shape professional journalism: “How can journalism maintain its normative democratic functions of scrutiny, accountability and transparency while offering a product that does not [also] promote unsustainable emotions of anxiety, cynicism and fear? How can it decouple the relationship between negativity and rigorous scrutiny?” (p. 3). In other words, how can journalism do a better job of understanding what audiences need now and how can scholarship in unrelated fields help.
Answers may be found, Dodd argues, in an analysis of solutions journalism, which he defines as reporting that seeks to “moderate negative news reports by centralizing more positive content: solutions, success stories, innovations, alternatives and even utopian re-imaginings of society” (p. 15). Examples of solutions journalism are found today in outlets ranging from the Guardian, the Huffington Post and the New York Times to “Some Good News,” an 8-week YouTube series hosted by actor John Krasinski in 2020 and attracting some 2.5 million subscribers.
The book is two books in one. Part 1 offers separate chapters to introduce contemporary thinking on hope and leadership, two of three pillars that inform Dodd’s framework for analyzing solutions journalism. Part 2, taking up most of the book, presents his case study on ways that the “New Tasmania” campaign in 2014 offered a real-world test of solutions journalism. Part 2 introduces the role of expertise as the third pillar of solutions journalism. While some readers may prefer to see all three fundamentals grouped into Part 1, Dodd’s organization progresses logically. For instance, by the time the role of expertise is raised in Part 2, the case study already has shed light on a distinguishing aspect of solutions journalism—that is, its commitment to expanding our notion “expert” to routinely include knowledgeable but non-governmental sources with solutions to offer (p. 127).
Despite some typos and dense prose, the book is a worthwhile supplement in upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses on research methods. Graduate courses in media studies, mass communications, news literacy, and community journalism also will find the book a useful companion. Appendices include notes on Dodd’s sample collection, data collection, and source analysis; a list of baseline interview questions; and a brief entry on his use of metaphor analysis methodology.
Part 1 considers the distinction between “constructive journalism,” whose tenets may be traced to the rise of positive psychology since the 1990s, and solutions journalism, with its focus on people working toward solutions and explaining how and why their efforts are succeeding or falling short. Proponents have characterized solutions-based practice as professional reporting that tells more complete stories that more accurately reflect a complex reality; critics say a focus on solutions swaps neutral journalism for advocacy while indulging in speculation about an idyllic future. Dodd draws throughout on research from The Solutions Journalism Network and the Constructive Institute to buttress the role of hope, leadership and expertise in his analytical framework.
Students, instructors and practitioners may especially value Chapter 1 for a section, “Journalism’s Psychotherapeutic Turn,” outlining ways that journalism has reformed certain practices to avoid endangering its audience’s well-being. The chapter provides context for Dodd’s conclusion that solutions-based journalism may be better equipped to distribute “authentic optimism” in society when it borrows insight from the fields of hope theory and psychology.
Chapter 2 addresses the contributions of leadership scholarship to Dodd’s framework. He considers the role of public journalism, traceable to the 1920s when Lippman and Dewey debated perspectives on democracy, as a forerunner to solutions journalism and its civil society goal of engaging people to deliberate for problem solving. Leadership is examined in sections such as governance and public opinion, leadership as symbolic capital, and the moral politics of leadership. While Dodd’s discussions of Bourdieu’s field theory and the role of metaphor in shaping behavior may be challenging material for some undergraduates, the chapter combines with Chapter 1 to adequately prepare readers for the case study and analysis in Part 2.
As Dodd sees it, news reports throughout the Tasmania election season amounted to a natural experiment in solutions journalism. Adopting the tag “New Tasmania” was an effort by governmental authorities to foster consensus and instill hope by focusing conversation on shared goals for a better future – attributes that align with the aims of solution journalism as practiced elsewhere in the world. The case study applies the framework outlined in Part 1 to consider how or if solutions journalism may foster hope while it also broadens our understanding of leadership and who may qualify as a leader. Specialized knowledge of the geopolitics of Tasmania is helpful but not necessary to benefit from the case study and its conclusions.
Spoiler alert: Problems that existed prior to the New Tasmania campaign persist. The viewpoints of potential thought leaders were marginalized and certain topics, such as a proposed ban on poker machines, took on outsized importance. Dodd turned to Tasmania because its relative isolation offered a clean slate to sample solutions reporting but found even here that “global winds of change and adversity, raised expectations and hopes dashed” were intractable (p. 150). Without agreeing among themselves to adapt strategies of solutions journalism, the Tasmanian reporters had tried nonetheless to address their audiences’ diminished optimism and public engagement. “[Even] though their responses to these challenges were imperfect,” Dodd concludes, “studying them enriches global understanding of solutions reporting, a practice as pervasive as hope itself” (p. 150.)
While a capsule history of reporting on “good news” would have been useful context to assess Dodd’s conclusions that solutions journalism will increase peoples’ willingness to fix problems without passively waiting for officials to act first, Solutions journalism is a worthwhile addition to our understanding of ways that responsible, responsive reporting may be enhanced by adapting knowledge and practice drawn from fields beyond our own.
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