Amplifying and Disseminating Insights
SJN is supporting and celebrating the work of partners and solutions journalism practitioners, continually developing new tools and resources, and producing a suite of newsletters that help share knowledge and insights within and beyond the network. In 2023 we also launched the Solutions Insights Lab, a targeted research and analysis service focused on identifying and interrogating what’s working and what’s not in a particular sector or field. While the SIL is not a work of journalism and is appropriately separated with a firewall from SJN’s core journalism work, it is advancing problem-solving knowledge by employing interviewing techniques drawn from the solutions journalism approach.
Pictured above: Ambika Samarthya-Howard, SJN’s chief innovation officer, interviews community members as part of a Solutions Insights Lab project in Bangladesh in May 2024.
Website, Newsletters & Social Platforms
Our site continues to hold the first position in Google Search for queries such as “solutions journalism,” “solution journalism,” “complicating the narrative,” “solutions journalism examples” and “what is solutions journalism.” Our engagement rate was 64.2%, which means in more than two-thirds of sessions, our website visitors stayed on a page for 10 seconds or longer, viewed more than one page or were otherwise meaningfully engaged. Sessions averaged 1 minute 42 seconds each.
The Climate and Democracy Solutions Worth Sharing newsletters grew subscribers by 68%, and Custom Story Alerts launched, serving users who receive stories they curate themselves from the Solutions Story Tracker®.
Resources & Engagement
The Solutions Story Tracker® tracked nine new countries with newsrooms adopting solutions journalism: Armenia, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Georgia, Iraq, Luxembourg, Portugal and Saudi Arabia. With 17 languages now featured in the Story Tracker, there are five new Language Spotlight pages in Spanish, French, Korean, Swahili and German.
Seven organizations became partners with the What’s Working Factbox, placing stories from the Story Tracker on their newsletters and websites.
Solutions Insights Lab
The Solutions Insights Lab (SIL), a new initiative from SJN, was created to look more deeply and systematically — with more detail and concentrated focus than is practical through traditional journalism — at the make-or-break details of implementation.
Grounded in research, interviews and conversations, the SIL aims to help people around the world learn from one another and cross-pollinate ideas, democratize knowledge, bring more conversation to successful and/or promising approaches, and support collaborative innovation.
A targeted research and intelligence-gathering service focused on identifying and interrogating what’s working and what’s not in a particular sector or field, the SIL employs interviewing techniques drawn from the solutions journalism approach, but is not a work of journalism and is appropriately separated with a firewall from SJN’s core journalism work.
Pictured: The Solutions Insights Lab launches the What’s Working portal at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England, in April 2023.
The first SIL project, launched in 2023, resulted in What’s Working: Solving the World’s Most Pressing Problems, a curated collection of solutions stories and insights mined from structured interviews with grantees in the Skoll Foundation’s portfolio.
Pictured above: Brightly colored stickers are party favors during a Solutions Journalism Network 10-year anniversary celebration in Lagos, Nigeria.