Democracy
We're supporting newsrooms as they examine what's working to strengthen democratic health and expanding coverage of enfranchisement. More than 100 journalists from 20 newsrooms joined the second Advancing Democracy Fellowship. Webinars, guides and an illustrated solutions reporting checklist have transformed insights and learnings into actions.
Pictured above: Beatrice Forman of Democracy Day and Jaisal Noor, SJN's democracy cohort manager, speak on a panel.
Advancing Democracy Fellowship
Many journalists today are rethinking how best to fulfill the media’s critical role in democracy. In 2023, more than 100 journalists from 20 newsrooms joined the second Advancing Democracy Fellowship, designed by SJN in partnership with Hearken, Trusting News and Good Conflict to support journalists in adopting an alternative to the usual focus on politicians and polls. Over nine months, participating journalists learned — and practiced — skills in solutions journalism, community and audience engagement, trust-building and how to avoid contributing to political polarization.
Two of this year’s highlights: The Current, in Louisiana, doubled its readership among young voters, and the audience of La Raza, in Chicago, chose solutions-focused coverage over stories about politicians’ promises and policies. Professor Sue Robinson of the University of Wisconsin, who is studying the fellowship, found that participating newsrooms are doubling and tripling solutions and trust-focused coverage while cutting horse-race reporting in half.
Youth Engagement and Reporting on Responses Teamed Up to Influence Policy
The Current, a local publication based in Lafayette, Louisiana, used email, social media and in-person events to gather more than 500 responses from young people answering questions about key issues ahead of local elections, such as housing, quality of life and flooding. In addition to growing brand awareness, this outreach and engagement led to the production of solutions-oriented stories. The Current also produced a candidate questionnaire, which most filled out, and an election guide. Lafayette’s new mayor-president, Monique Blanco Boulet, took heed of the ideas for responses to housing issues presented in the solutions reporting and those discussed in public forums with local residents in shaping the policies of her administration.
Democracy Solutions Webinars
In fall 2023, four SJN-hosted webinars moderated by Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian, tackled how to step away from traditional horse-race coverage of politics and elections (which research shows hurts communities and newsrooms) and dedicate more resources to reporting on democracy. The webinars dealt with how to incorporate solutions reporting into elections coverage, what it means to be a “pro-democracy” newsroom, how to cover threats to democracy with a solutions lens, and how to put new engagement, trust-building and solutions skills into practice.
The series drew 135 participants live and was subsequently made available online. “Why aren’t more newsrooms taking this approach?” one participant asked afterward. Others said the sessions inspired them to conceive their coverage differently, and helped them better understand how reporting on elections and democracy is a year-round activity.
[Journalists are] now using new ways of writing to address the problem of holding power to accountability or shining a spotlight on wrongdoing by highlighting what is going right and where we can look to for solutions to fix some of our problems. When we look at training journalists, we need to get them up to speed with these new trends.
Democracy Solutions Resources
SJN distilled the tips and strategies from our Democracy and Solutions webinars into two guides: The Democracy Landscape and Elevating Democracy Reporting: A Guide for Journalists. In April, we published the Solutions Reporting Checklist for covering democracy. All these resources are designed to help journalists who recognize that what’s at stake in our elections isn’t just who wins and loses, but also the health of our democracy itself.
[I]n so much of the coverage that we see, gun violence is presented as intractable, that it’s just part of Black and brown communities, part of urban communities, and essentially that there’s nothing that can be done about it. We reject that idea.
