“The basics.” We may not add a story to the Solutions Story Tracker for the following reasons:
Not Connected With A Media Organization
Submitted stories must have been published or broadcast by media entities whose primary purpose is to offer strong, critical, and independent reporting. Examples of stories that may be excluded for this reason are YouTube videos that are not connected to a news organization or journalist.
No Date
The Solutions Story Tracker is used for research. It is important that stories have dates for citations.
Solutions journalism focuses primarily on a response or responses to a problem. If a story misses this mark, we may not add it to the Solutions Story Tracker for the following reasons:
No Description of How the Response Works
This story mentions a response, but it doesn’t describe how the response worked in detail so that others might learn from it.
Problem Only
This story has little or no information about a response. It is primarily focused on a problem.
Afterthought
This problem-focused story includes a paragraph or sound bite hinting at initiatives working to combat the problem, but responses are not the main focus of this piece.
Not About Solving A Social Problem
This story is about interesting or positive things that are happening, but they don’t amount to a response to a social issue or problem.
Solutions journalism conveys insight, so that lessons of a response are relevant and accessible to others. If a story misses this mark, we may not add it to the Solutions Story Tracker for the following reasons:
Lacks Insight
This story lacks detail on the response to make it useful, valuable, and full of learning for the news consumer.
Produces Good Feelings, Without Insight
The story highlights acts of kindness and nice things happening, aiming to uplift the audience’s mood. Solutions journalism does more than just produce good feelings. This story needs a teachable lesson about how the response can be replicated in other contexts.
Solutions journalism provides evidence of a response’s success or failure or indications of progress linked to a response. If a story misses this mark, we may not add it to the Solutions Story Tracker for the following reasons:
Just A Plan / It's Too Early
This story is about a plan with little or no progress happening yet. At this stage, the response has been announced or launched, but there is no information yet about its impact or effectiveness.
Think Tank
The story proposes a potential solution and discusses primarily theoretical challenges and opportunities, but real-world insights are limited because the response has not been tested or tried yet.
Research Study Summary without Additional Reporting
This story primarily summarizes the findings of a research study. The story lacks practical applications or additional context and reporting by the journalist, but it does offer value in the world of solutions. While these research study stories are not solutions journalism, they are automatically flagged for potential future projects with us and are great supplemental materials for our staff to read.
Raising Awareness without Evidence
The reporting in this story is focused on raising awareness about a response, but doesn’t describe anything beyond its happening. As a result, insight and evidence of its impact are not present. While raising awareness is important, solutions journalism values evidence to show how a response is working or not working in that effort.
Solutions journalism discusses the limitations or shortcomings of the response or places the response in meaningful context. If a story misses this mark, we may not add it to the Solutions Story Tracker for the following reasons:
No Limitations
This story does not discuss the limitations or shortcomings of the response or places the response in meaningful context. As a result, the story of the response is incomplete and the insight is limited.
Needs Additional Perspectives
This story relies too much on the journalist's personal experience to describe a response without addressing the shortcomings of the approach. Rigorous solutions journalism should inform the news consumer about the response as a priority.
Solutions journalism has credible, objective reporting that is clear and understandable for people interested in scaling the response. If a story misses this mark, we may not add it to the Solutions Story Tracker for the following reasons:
Lacks a Cohesive Focus
This story’s narrative lacks enough focus on an approach to meet our four criteria of solutions journalism (response, evidence, insight, limitations), preventing the learning from being scalable to others. If more than one response is spotlighted in a story, the narrative needs to have a cohesive focus and still meet our four qualities so that valuable learning can happen.
Needs Additional Perspectives
This story relies too much on the journalist's personal experience to describe a response without addressing the shortcomings of the approach. Rigorous solutions journalism should inform the news consumer about the response as a priority.
Instant Activist
This story asks news consumers to support the response to a social issue (e.g. buttons embedded within the story encourage readers to 'Get involved,' 'Donate here,' 'Support this campaign here,' etc.). Solutions journalism is about providing information to news consumers, not telling them which responses they should support.
Not Independent Journalism
The journalist seems to be connected with the response profiled or offers the perspective of the organizers only. These stories often lack voices other than that of the journalist and the organizers of a response. They often read like thinly veiled PR. Actual PR and other promotional content also falls into this category.
A Personality Profile
This story is primarily about profiling, celebrating, or honoring an individual, rather than focusing on the response that the individual is leading or advancing.
Multiple Initiatives need a thru-line
While this piece highlights multiple responses aimed at addressing the problem, no single response is described in enough detail to meet all the criteria of solutions journalism.
Finally, there are a few other reasons why we may not add a story to the Solutions Story Tracker:
Broken Link
Oops! Please submit this story again with a working link.
It's A Blog
We generally do not accept blog posts because they often do not go through an established editorial infrastructure for fact-checking and rigorous reporting. When such a system is present, the story may be included in the Solutions Story Tracker.
Not Accessible for Us to Review
We were not able to review this story submission because it is behind a paywall. While stories in the Solutions Story Tracker can be behind paywalls, our team needs access to be able to review and tag the story. Please reach out to Marie von Hafften (marie@solutionsjournalism.org) to discuss possible workarounds.
Series Description / Landing Page
This is a link to a series description or landing page. The Solutions Story Tracker does not catalog series as a whole. We vet, tag, and catalog stories individually. Please submit the individual solutions stories that are part of this series or project.
Keep on Record
With our limited staffing, we were not able to review your story submission at this time and are instead maintaining a record of your submission for future projects and important analysis. Thank you for your submission!
Spam / Not A Story
Our story reviewing team thought this was not a story.
Other
Our story reviewing team occasionally writes in custom comments for unusual issues, such as when they are reviewing a story that is a repost of a story already in the Solutions Story Tracker.
