In its first four years, SJN has focused on intensive newsroom engagements to demonstrate proof of concept for solutions journalism. We have built a portfolio of highly visible and credible news organizations whose strong solutions-oriented reporting projects serve as “beacons,” catalyzing imitation and replication by other journalists. These engagements last six months or longer and typically involve substantial financial support from SJN.

Community Vitality: In 2016, SJN engaged six newsrooms in projects focused on community vitality, all featuring intensive audience and community engagement components. For example, The Minneapolis Star Tribune produced groundbreaking reporting on responses to the threat of radicalization and ISIS recruitment of young Somalis in the Twin Cities. The paper created a full-time position for a Somali-speaking reporter, hosted a conversation with 25 Somali community leaders and used Listening Post, a phone-based engagement tool, to surface neighborhood-level insights and build trust with Somali residents. Additionally, the Star Tribune translated stories into Somali and established a content exchange partnership with Mshale, the local Somali newspaper, to further the reach of its solutions content.

Responses to Violence: Ten newsrooms partnered with SJN to produce solutions series on different aspects of violence. Many of these projects featured town hall meetings or other audience engagement components, including an interactive database. Newspapers (including the Cleveland Plain Dealer), a TV Network (Univision), and a public radio station (WNYC) tackled solutions stories on violence against immigrants, gun violence in urban settings, and domestic violence. The Detroit Free Press delivered an ambitious multimedia series on solutions to the impact of violence on Detroit’s children. This series featured robust audience engagement in the form of surveys, crowdsourcing, and a town hall of policy makers and other stakeholders.

Philadelphia Reentry Reporting Collaborative: The Philadelphia Reentry Reporting Collaborative, which launched in November, is a consortium of 16 Philadelphia news outlets and two universities reporting on responses to the challenge of ex-prisoner reentry into society. The impact of this work is already emerging: The project website has become a “hush harbor,” where people can come to tell their own reentry stories. And reentry service providers have started reaching out to see how we can work together.

Mountain West Collaboration: We also launched, “Small Towns, Big Change,” a network of seven small newsrooms in New Mexico and Colorado that committed to jointly exploring responses to the challenges facing rural communities. The six-month initiative yielded 50 stories, creating a persistent knowledge asset for communities looking for new ways to tackle old problems. It also introduced the solutions approach to smaller news organizations, a critical constituency for SJN.

Education Lab Continues: SJN’s partnership with The Seattle Times on “Education Lab,” an intensive investigation of responses to public education in Washington state, entered its fourth year – three years longer than we had originally anticipated. “Education Lab” has become a leading destination for daily solutions-oriented news and conversation about education in the Seattle area; its reporting and engagement activities have produced identifiable impact, leading to productive discussion of potential solutions and changed policy. It also has emerged as a model for other journalists, attracting attention, plaudits, and even envy from education reporters and editors across the nation – and providing a crucial base of evidence that has helped to advance the practice of solutions journalism in other newsrooms.