Tina Rosenberg on the Role of Evidence in Solutions Journalism

[J.B. WOGAN]

I'm J.B. Wogan from Mathematica, and welcome to this live recording of On The Evidence, the Mathematica podcast. For this episode, I'll be talking with our guest Tina Rosenberg about the role of evidence in solutions journalism. Of particular interest to this podcast audience, the Solutions Journalism Network challenges journalists to look for data or qualitative results that show whether a solution they're covering is actually effective. Today’s conversation will explore what solutions journalism is and how organizations that generate evidence of effectiveness can contribute to reporting about solutions. Tina, welcome to the podcast.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

It’s a pleasure to be here.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So, I was hoping that we could start with a little background information. Our listeners might have a rough guess of what we mean by solutions journalism but your organization has a somewhat specific definition. So, what is solutions journalism on what is the mission of the Solutions Journalism Network?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Mm hmm. So, our mission is to transform journalism, not just in the United States, but around the globe by tilting the balance away from coverage of what's wrong to include coverage of how people are trying to solve problems, what those responses are and what the evidence says about whether they're working or not. So we are an organization, as you said, started about 10 years ago, nonpartisan, a nonprofit. We work with journalists and freelancers around the world to help them do this kind of journalism, reporting on what works or how people are trying to make something work so they can do that with a sense of professional safety and not fall into advocacy or cheerleading, or public relations or fluff.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So how did you become interested in covering solutions as a journalist and where has that manifested in the work that you do outside of this organization?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Well, I mean first of all, we didn't invent solutions journalism. An awful lot of people practice it without putting a name on it, without, and if you said, are you a solutions journalist? They would say, what's that? But they do it. For example, Michael Lewis, most of his books, like “The Big Short,” “Moneyball,” are about people who have succeeded in doing something, winning in baseball with a low salary, cap salary with not much income, that others have not. And the books are about how they do it. So that is classic solutions journalism.

For myself, it came out of a story that I wanted to do back in the year 2000. I had been living in Latin America for a long time, and working also for the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times, and I pitched my editor on a story about the price of AIDS medicines in countries that were resource poor. And the issue was is that these medicines, which had been available for about five years, AIDS treatments, triple therapy, were so expensive, $20,000 a year, $15,000 a year, that no one, almost no one in poor countries could afford these drugs, so the countries with the highest burden of HIV AIDS, could not use them. That was widely known at the time, but what was not widely known was why. And the reason was collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and the government of turn in Washington, at the time it was Bill Clinton, but didn't really matter. And they were putting political pressure in countries not to make or buy generic versions of these drugs. So, I pitched that to my editor, I thought this was a really important investigative piece, and he said no. He said, it's too depressing and it's not fresh. We can't inflict another seven thousand word story on our audience about everybody with HIV in Malawi is going to die. So I went home and I rethought it, then I turned it inside out.

This is the solutions part. There was one country that was in fact defying this pressure, making its own generic versions of antiretrovirals and providing them for free to all its citizens who needed these drugs. And that was Brazil. So the piece become, what is Brazil doing and what are they achieving by it? And in the course of telling that story, I could say everything I wanted to say about the bad behavior that was occurring. It was a way to talk about the investigative part but through a different lens. So, that had several advantages, first of all, got into the paper. And you're not doing anything if you don't get that.

Second of all, it was fresh, people did know that folks with HIV in Malawi were going to die, they did not know that those people in Brazil were going to live normal life spans. And it had some impact. The world was just starting to talk about antiretrovirals and how, whether they could be used in resource poor countries. And Brazil showed that it was possible. So it pushed the debate a little from whether poor countries could use these drugs to how can poor countries do what Brazil is already doing? So since that time, every time I wrote a piece about something that my editor would say oh, that's too depressing, which was all the time, I asked myself, is there a way to turn this inside out and talk about it through someone trying to respond to that problem? And that was solutions journalism for me.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Interesting, and that was, you had been a journalist for more than a decade at that point, so this was an epiphany.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Maybe four decades, a long time. But I always wrote about torture and public health disasters and dictatorship, and I don't think I ever wrote a story that had included a solution before and, or even gave a sense that the problems I was covering were being solved in some parts of the wireless. And that was wrong because it was giving a distorted picture of the world.

[J.B. WOGAN]

There is one other thing about, from a definitional standpoint that I wanted to cover, which is when we're talking about solutions journalism, I want to make sure to cover one point about what it is not. I know that this comes up in some of the materials, the free education materials the organization offers online, but what makes solutions journalism different from advocacy or PR?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Okay, good question. And a question we get a lot from journalists. It doesn't celebrate or choose responses, it covers them. So, it looks at different things that people are doing, what works about them and what doesn't work about them. And it could be a story about Response A today and Response B tomorrow, and Response C, and it's not saying we should do this. It's saying, let's look at a place that has done this and how well it's gone. It's just reporting.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay, okay, excellent, and I think evidence is probably part of the way that you distinguish too. So I do have one more definitional question but I think this will segue nicely into some of the data driven work that our listeners do. Could you explain the concept of positive deviance and what it means in the context of solutions journalism?

 

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, thanks for asking that, it's my favorite concept. So, there's two ways to do a solutions journalism story, to find the story, which is a challenge for a lot of people. How do I know that this is something worth covering? One way is because you hear about a group doing something really cool. Like an NGO that has managed to make sure that schools have washing machines so that kids who don't want to come to school because their clothes are dirty and they don't have washing facilities at home, have a place to do that at school. That's a really cool solutions journalism story. But it's a small one usually, and it's one that often doesn't have much evidence to it. The other way of doing it, of finding a solutions story, is to take the problem and cut it into small pieces, each of those pieces being an important key bottleneck, we're not solving this because -- because there's every problem can be cut into an infinite number of sub-problems. Then you use data to see who is doing better on that particular problem.

For example, you get a database of New York State hospitals and their C-section rates and the usual tendency of a journalist is to look for the worst performer and then pounce, you know, let's expose this hospital, which is doing bad things. You should also look for the best performer, and see what it is they're doing that is working and why and if it's a database you trust, then it's no more risky to write about the best performer than it is to write about the worst performer. And there's many, many, many ways to do that. Why have Poland's smoking rates dropped so precipitously compared to other countries? Why is it that exercise rates went up so much in Kentucky? Much more than anywhere else? Why is it that this county has very low rates of childhood asthma? Almost every problem can be attacked this way, through data and by looking at who's doing a better job? What's a hospital with the best rates of C. diff infection? What's a school that has almost eliminated the gap between black and white economic achievement?

And one of the reasons that these are really great stories is that they're almost by definition, meaty, they are five ounce, they're not five ounce solutions to five ton problems. They're five ton solutions to five ton problems, because if you can find them in the data as a place that's done better, that means it's feasible and it makes a difference. The data shows you that it has made a difference. So I love these kinds of positive deviant stories.

[J.B. WOGAN]

It reminds me, I remember going to a training a while back, I don't know if it's still called this, but computer assisted reporting, more than a decade ago --

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Why call that that anymore?

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Is there anything that isn't? But yeah.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah, but it used to be, I think that was when I was first starting out, a sort of, it felt like the cutting edge where you were pulling data into an Excel sheet and then playing with it to find the median and the mean and you'd look for the -- but they did teach you how to look for the outliers but it was usually in the context of yeah, what was the most, what was the worst performer or the most, you know --

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, in part because that computer existed, computer assisted reporting classes taught by IRE, which is the Investigative Reporting and Editors Network, and investigative reporting, which is defined as information people don't want you to know, is always focused on the problem. I mean, we contend that writing a solutions angle to an investigative story is really great because it can take away the excuses of people who are doing badly, like the Brazil story did. If you know it's possible, then why the hell aren't we doing it? So it actually is a good combination but investigative reporting is generally focused on exposing problems and not much else.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Right, yeah. But I think it's interesting, this turn of it being you can apply some of those same skills and sensibilities towards solutions and still be, make it rigorous. So for a lot of our listeners, I think that third pillar in the definition of solutions journalism about including evidence of effectiveness, is going to be music to their ears to, it's definitely music to my ears, not only because it's a part of the definition, but it represents such a big piece of the model. Could you share a bit about how it came to be one of the four pillars and why it was important to elevate evidence of effectiveness in this way?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Sure. Well let me just mention what the four pillars are, because I'm not sure that we've done that. First of all, it's a story about a response to a problem. It does not exclusively necessarily but response is part of the story. Second of all, it looks for insights, not just inspiration, it's about a systemic response and we can learn from something from that story that others can use to help move that program elsewhere or replicate it. Third of all, evidence, I'll come back to that. And fourth, limitations. You have to cover what's not working about it, otherwise it's public relations. So, evidence is used in a more expensive and probably thinner way than you use it as a, as somebody who looks at academic research, and that is that you have to tell people in your story, what we know and what we don't know. And that evidence doesn't have to be quantitative, it can be, it's the same standard of evidence you would use for any story. It can just be a lot of people you talk to who said X and Y and Z. It could be an expert who says this, it could be people served by the response who say well, this part is good but this part needs some help.

So it does not have to be 30 years of randomized control trials. In fact, if it is, then by definition what you're writing about isn't news. So, that's always a problem, that tradeoff there. But if, let's say there is no good data, there's no data of that shows anything. Now let me give you an example of a story, which we like to use in training, it's a story from Barrow, Alaska, which is above the Arctic Circle, and it's a place where there is a very high level of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. And the judge there, who got the nickname, Minimum Mike, designed his courtroom to be friendly to defendants with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and also there's a probation officer who's learned these techniques and the DA has learned these techniques of how to make people feel comfortable, how to make the court understandable to them, how to make it feel fair to them, how to make them feel part of it.

So, that's a fascinating story, there is absolutely no evidence that it works. There's no evidence that it doesn't either, but they just never had any money to study it. So, does that mean we shouldn't write about it? I would say no. You do write about it, but you say, as the reporter said in the story, we don't know if this works. But it's a good story. So you can write about it and it's a solutions story.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah. So, the Network supports journalists who cover responses to social problems, but as a communications professional looking to share the story of solutions with new evidence of effectiveness, I found that some of its advice is applicable to my work as well, I'm hoping other people on, during this live recording are seeing that as well. For example, Mathematica sometimes produces reports about a specific initiative or demonstration project that's in one place and when it comes to write the press release, we debate how to make the research as relevant as possible to as broad of an audience as possible, so advice to you give journalists when they're writing about a solution that was implemented in one context or in one community, but really could be of interest, or should be of interest to people outside of that original context or community?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, can you give me an example, J.B., of a kind of intervention you're talking about?

[J.B. WOGAN]

So, let's see, what's a recent one? So for example, early on my time here, there was a study about the soda tax in Philadelphia and there are some very unique elements to the design of the soda tax in Philadelphia, but there are lots of places that are interested in the, in reducing childhood obesity or reducing consumption of sugary beverages, but the, I think at the time, it was maybe the only city that had taxed sugary and artificially sweetened drinks, for example, so when it came time to report on the results from that study, how do we make sure that we're not sort of, I guess just making sure that we're not claiming that the findings are relevant to communities outside of Philadelphia or that the solution is relevant if you don't have the same, either don't have a soda tax or don't have the same kind of soda tax. That may not be a perfect example, but that's the first one that comes to mind.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

So I would, my advice to journalists would be, turn that into an investigative story about what your city is not doing that it should be doing. And it could be, maybe a soda tax here, maybe there's a new law that is looking at how streets are designed in order to reduce pedestrian deaths that's been successful, anything you want, take that evidence and say, let's look at what our city is doing and if in fact that's, the city is not doing that, and it's getting poor results, then write a story about that, investigate what your city is doing wrong and as part of that story, include this example, that hey, over here in Milwaukee, they've done this, so why aren't we doing this in Madison? That is the kind of story that appeals to journalists because it's investigative. Only you use that solutions part to take away excuses.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So I have another question I think is an example of overlap between solutions journalists and research organizations, in terms of navigating a storytelling challenge. Sometimes a study publishes and the top line finding is, solution x doesn't work, or did not work as intended. If that automatically not news or is there a productive and newsworthy way to frame evidence that shows the solution did not work?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Productive in what sense?

[J.B. WOGAN]

Like can it still be useful to --

[TINA ROSENBERG]

To a journalist or to the public?

[J.B. WOGAN]

To the public I think, yeah, to the public.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

I think it is useful to the public, no matter what, because failure is good to learn from as well as success. So, but for journalists, which is what I can really talk about, a failed solution is still a solutions story. Journalists tend to write those only when there's some organic reason to do that. For example, that thing is coming to your city. So if you wrote for the Detroit Free Press, and Ford is about to adopt a quality control method that Boeing has been using, then you can go to Seattle, or wherever the hell Boeing is now, I don't even know, Mexico probably, but and you can write a piece about how well that's worked for Boeing, and it's an interesting and relevant solution story for the Detroit Free Press, whether it's completely successful, a total failure, or anywhere in between. So yes, failure is of interest to journalists if there's a particular reason that's relevant to my community. If not, they probably will not report much on that story.

[J.B. WOGAN]

The, in my previous role as, I used to be a staff writer at Governing Magazine, and when we sometimes we would write on the frontend when a committee would launch something innovative where there wasn't really any data or evidence yet, and but it was a promising solution to a widespread problem, and the thing that I would always try to do is make a note to myself a couple years later to go back and see, well now what's happened? Because we were really good about covering the launch of the initiative, but especially if there wasn't evidence that it was effective, we wouldn't necessarily get that call back from the city asked to hey, come back and write about what's happening now. And I think that's, this seems like a really important part of the continuum of reporting on solutions.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

You're totally right. It is really important, A, just to follow-up, which journalists are very bad at doing. But also, it's that journalists tend to think, oh, I've written about a bill being passed to establish a program, or money being appropriated for a program. And that's it, solved. We all know that that is totally not true. And you actually can't even do a solution story until there is something going on on the ground to report on. If it's just theoretical or just future, or just a bill passed or something, you can't do a solutions story because you can't look at it and say, looks like this part worked, that part didn't work. So it's really important to wait until there's a program that you can cover and to acknowledge that it's early days and we will come back and then come back.

[J.B. WOGAN]

What about partial solutions? I think this comes up in some of the trainings, I took the basic toolkit that you all offer and if a program reduces, say this is just a hypothetical, but let's say a program reduces chronic homelessness by 5%, but the community's original goal was to end homelessness, is that still a story and what's the organization's philosophy on the value of partial solutions?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, well everything's a partial solution. I mean there is no such thing as a complete solution to anything anywhere. So, that's always a problem you get. But it's probably also the case of the journalists don't care how you've defined success, they care how they would define success and 5% reduction, I don't know, if everybody else is getting worse with homelessness, then a 5% reduction might be worth reporting on.

There was a study recently published on a program called Ready Chicago, that the University of Chicago's NORC Lab did and the goals for the program had been to reduce shootings, reduce recidivism in all sorts of crime and something else, property crime, and it had a tremendous effect on reducing shootings, but didn't do so well at the other goals and so the headline was, Program Fails. I would disagree with that. I would say that if you found something that seriously reduces shootings, that's success, that's worth reporting on. Whether, even if it didn't meet the goals you set out, which I know is one of the principles of academic research, you can't move the goal post once you've started, but journalists don't have to follow those same goal posts.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So a lot of our listeners produce the kind of evidence that might end up in a story about solutions, if they aren't already, I imagine they're going to be excited about this movement that centers data and other evidence about responses to social problems. So, how can our listeners help support solutions journalism and make it more of the norm? What role can they play?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

That's a great question and we've been struggling with that. We know that this is something that non-journalists want. In fact, non-journalists understand and appreciate this concept much more easily than journalists do. Non-journalists say of course you're going to report on what's working. Journalists are like, that's not news. And so it's absolutely the case that audiences and communities want this.

The problem is, it's hard to find a feedback mechanism to let journalists know that that's the case. And one way of doing it is just looking at the metrics of your digital, because you obviously can't know with print, but with digital news product, are people clicking on these stories? Are people, that's less important because we all know what people like to click on. Are people spending time with these stories? Do they go, do they read them for longer? Are these the kinds of stories that lead you to sign up for a newsletter? Or to subscribe to a publication? And the answer to those latter two things about time on page and signing up to be a paying customer in some way is yes, solutions journalism does do that. And that is pretty key to what journalists need to understand the value of this. Look, journalists know that our numbers, in terms of news engagement have been dropping. People are really tired of the news.

The CDC even issued a bulletin saying, for your own mental health, stop reading the news during COVID. Or, give yourselves breaks. Because it's painful. I mean, we produce a product that's painful to consume and then we wonder why no one will pay for it. And so journalists understand the value of producing the kinds of reporting that communities want but is still serious reporting that isn't fluff and PR. But the imperatives of the everyday way the newsroom is run make it very hard to change. And we, when we started, we thought attitude change would be a very difficult problem, and it hasn't been, but behavior change has been. And the reason is, is that you walk out of the workshop saying, oh, I'm really psyched about this, I want to do this story, I'm going to do this, this, and this, but today I have three other pieces I have to finish, so I'll think about it tomorrow. And guess what? Tomorrow never comes. And so, it's very hard to change a newsroom's routine.

So we need evidence that people want it. And so, if you read pieces that are, that you find useful, and high value, which is what we think newsrooms should be doing, we think any newsroom that's going to survive is going to survive because they offer something to their community that others don't offer. So if you read something or listen or watch something that's very high value, subscribe to a newsletter, subscribe to the publication, tweet it out, share it on social, make, do something that has some feedback to the newsroom itself in terms of wanting this kind of journalism.

[J.B. WOGAN]

One question that we've gotten is about the story tracker. Could you speak a little bit, because that seems like another part of this, maybe that's another way that people could contribute, what is the story tracker that the Network runs and how can people participate in that or support it?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, that's a great point. The story tracker is something that's accessible through our website, and it's got a button for that, and it's basically a database of solution stories. And we have a group of people, human beings, for the moment, who collect section stories and vet them, make sure they're good, they fill the four pillars of solutions journalism, they summarize them, they tag them for search, and they link to them. So the IP is not held on our website with the database, it's just linked to. And we have I think about 15 thousand stories in there right now. There's a lot.

So anything you're interested in, you can go and look at it and search for that. If you're interested in homelessness solutions that are in Texas, and have entered by certain news organizations, or are broadcast in more than 15 minutes long, or use certain strategies, we even tag by what kind of strategy was used, which is hard to do. This story tracker is very, very useful for policy makers, for all sorts of people. And it's not really a way to provide feedback though to journalists, because the amount a story is going to get read because it's on the story tracker is not, it's pretty negligible from overall, I mean if it gets five people click on it in a week, the newsroom is not going to notice that.

[J.B. WOGAN]

We have another question that's come in, thanks so much to Dave here, he asked; what qualities make for the best research partners from a solutions journalism perspective?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

I would say that a journalist will get, a serious journalist at a decent publication may get 50 press releases a day. And some of them, I mean the vast majority won't even be clicked on, the email. So the quality that makes it good is to have it in the subject line of the email, you know, homelessness drops by 15%, or, low income students' test scores double. Some shorthand that shows you something important went on here and the numbers can prove it. Then I'm going to click on that. And I'm going to read all about it and you don't have to give me individual stories of people, I'll find those. Or, sometimes I'll ask you for help in finding them. But I want to know that this is something worth reporting on. Journalists are so strapped for time that we don't want to spend our time on something that may not pan out.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay, we have another question --

[TINA ROSENBERG]

It's really more of a marketing issue than a research issue.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah, I mean, yeah I understand that yeah, you've got to be able to make sure it's worth the journalist's while and clarify what the takeaway is at the top. And of course the research itself should be rigorous, right? There what be some sense of credibility at the beginning, yeah?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah.

[J.B. WOGAN]

We have another question here, from Michael, who asks what effect does a lacking understanding of data have within a newsroom, for example, can data can be massive and to distill meaningful insights down can be a challenge unto itself. So, could a lack of understanding be another factor here? Could it allow for jumping to conclusions?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Michael, you are so totally right. And a lack of understanding is even more lethal because it means I'm not even going to look at that database, because I know there's nothing I can do to make myself understand it. There's enough literacy in data so people get some of the basics, like you can't say, for example, oh you know, people in Westchester County, which is a ritzy suburb of New York, had better test scores than people in the Bronx. Let's investigate why.

Well, a journalist is going to know, no, we know the reason for that. The Bronx is the poorest urban county in America, Westchester is one of the richest counties in America. We understand what those kinds of confounders are. But, that, beyond that, we're pretty hopeless most of us, and some of the, some newsrooms have the luxury of having a data person, but it is pretty rare. It's pretty rare. And journalists are just really intimidated by data. And won't even go there. Because we're afraid of jumping to conclusions. We don't want to be wrong, so we just don't, we just don't do it.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I'm course for any of our listeners, if you wouldn't mind putting in the chat, any recent examples you can think of -- of solutions stories that have stuck with you, I think I, did I see that the New Yorker has, maybe I'm going to get this wrong, I thought the --

[TINA ROSENBERG]

The whole issue on climate solutions.

[J.B. WOGAN]

On climate solutions, yes, and I feel like that's a trend that I've seen more solution stories in general, and more --

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Climate in particular. I think there's this growing realization that climate is reporting itself. Climate change is reporting itself. We need to report on what's happening because if we keep just saying, we're doomed, we're doomed, we're doomed, you drive people into fatalism and inaction, and that's just as bad as denialism. So, we need to be talking about serious solutions, not like, I changed my sunscreen, but serious policy solutions or business solutions that are big and work.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Let's see, so, what advice do you offer, I guess this is, yeah, this is a question specifically about journalists, but I'm curious, what advice do you offer journalists as they assess evidence, especially if the evidence is mixed and experts disagree on how to interpret the evidence. So, I mean journalists aren't necessarily going to be methodological experts for example, so I'm curious like, how are they supposed to navigate those waters and interpret evidence?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Well a bad journalist with cherry pick the part that they want to. Which we see plenty of. A good journalist would probably not write about it because they are afraid to get it wrong. But one of the advantages of the solutions approach is that it admits for nuance. We're not looking for perfect programs, nobody expects a program to be perfect. And we are open to the idea that parts of something work and parts of something don't work. And then the question isn't does something work, it's what about it works and what doesn't work? And so I think there's a little bit more room there for journalists to look at mixed results and write a story about those. But an editor would often come in and say, if there's no strong conclusion here, why take up our rigorous time with this? And your time as a reporter. Very often —

[J.B. WOGAN]

So, I'm getting another question here, this is about social media. You talked about page views and kind of the performance data that shows that solution stories seem to be more successful on the website. But what about in terms of social media uptake, is there any indication that people respond more on social media sites as well?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Oh yeah. People love to share this stuff. It's, you know, makes you feel cool and it's exciting and it's something different. For example, the New York Times has a section called, Headway, which is solutions journalism about big issues. And Michael Kimmelman wrote this piece about how Houston has reduced homelessness by considerable amount, very long piece, very in-depth piece. It was the single most Instagrammed piece in the history of the New York Times. A problem focused piece about homelessness would not have come anywhere near there. The column that my co-founder at SJN, David Bornstein, Solutions Journalism Network, and I used to write at the New York Times called fixes, we very often had stories in the most shared category, even when they were things like about putting in toilets in villages in India. That's not a story that would normally get on the most emailed list. But it did.

[J.B. WOGAN]

We'll follow-up afterwards with some links, I really enjoyed there was a story that you did in the Fixes about how to increase, I think voter participation and getting people through word of mouth as they were coming out of the polls to encourage other people to vote and it was a nonpartisan solution to increase voter participation. So we'll be sure after this webinar, to share some additional links. And then you referenced offhand AI and the impact of AI, I think you were talking about, like you were joking about the story tracker and monitoring for stories. But there is so much talk about ChatGPT right now, is there any role for AI to help in sort of tracking and elevating solutions stories or what -- is there anything in terms of for intersection of AI and solutions journalism that you want to flag?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, well there's probably a huge amount that we don't know about yet. But one in particular which is, we would love to be able to teach a machine to identify solutions journalism, which is hard to do because it's not like you can look for certain words, in fact, a good solution story will probably not have the word solution in it. So it's a very difficult issue and we've tried with various language models and haven't been successful. Maybe there's an AI way of doing that. If that's possible, then we can go to Google and say, hey, why don't you ask people if they'd like to prioritize solution stories in their news feeds, when they do a query for news would you like to, would you like to have solution stories among your top hits? Or, here's a button and it'll show you some solution stories on this topic. Right now we can't do that because we need a machine to be able to see what solutions journalism is. So if anybody out there wants to work on this problem, please tag me.

[J.B. WOGAN]

The tracker reminds me a little bit of some of the clearinghouses that both Mathematica and other organizations run for the federal government where they've had these almost like Wikipedia or consumer reports websites that are for, and Results America is a very good one that you can now make a mobility catalog of interventions that have been implemented and evidence of their effectiveness, but this is another creative take on that general concept. We have a listener here, a viewer I guess, I'm so used to talking about listeners for the podcast, but a viewer asks, if you could distill good journalists into key skillsets, what would make your top three?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Besides the usual, let's assume people know about the five W's, et cetera, I would say a tolerance for nuance, and not trying to cartoonify and you know, elevate the loudest voices on both sides, and call it balanced. Television shows are so nuanced, we don't watch Leave it to Beaver anymore, we watch Breaking Bad, so in that way, television, scripted television, fictional television, tells a truer story than a lot of journalism does. Because with journalism we don't, we're not interested in nuance, we're just in black and white and that's bad. So, I would say that's a really key skillset. Let's just, let me just stop with that.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Michael asks; with the rapid introduction of massive data points daily, could data literacy programs support solutions journalism and help to provide more perspective?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Oh, absolutely. Journalists need data literacy programs, and that is why NICAR, the computer assisted reporting classes that you took are so valuable. They really are, in fact, data journalism not just computer journalism, because everything's computer journalism. But it's very important. But it's also important to be able for small news organizations to not have to do all that work themselves. If you have published results that are in a database, tease out the takeaways in a way that's understandable, I mean people do do this, that's kind of 101, but you don't want to scare people away from reporting on your stuff because they can't understand it.

[J.B. WOGAN]

You talked at the beginning of this conversation, you talked about your own solutions journalism origin story and sort of beginning with an investigative piece, I'm imagining it was a long form investigative piece, is that the only format or venue in which solutions journalism can manifest or are there opportunities for other daily, you know, quick daily stories? Where do you see opportunity for more solution stories?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, everywhere. I mean if this were only long form stories, we would have died, because there is no, people don't do long form stories anymore. Yeah, you can do a 90 second local news TV spot with, that's solutions focused. It can be a part of every journalist beat. Not every journalistic, it works for people who cover issues. Not breaking news. It's not a tool to cover breaking news. But if you cover criminal justice, or health, or recycling, or any issue, you can make solutions journalism part of your beat. And these stories can be short.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I know, in my previous life I was always, when I was trying to figure out what's a good story, I would look for drama and conflict as ingredients that would be interesting to the reader. What is the, how do you incorporate some of those elements into a solutions story where you're not just trying to be negative, you are trying to be constructive in some way?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

A great question. I mean a solution story is a how done it. People know from the headline, this place did something that other places didn't, or this group did something that other places didn't. How did they do that? And you want to keep reading, not because there's conflict necessarily, although you're going to get people who say different things and you're going to watch people that work in different ways. But because you want to solve this mystery story of what was it that Brazil did that other countries didn't? How were they able to do that? What was it that Houston did? That's the key to solutions journalism and what keeps people reading.

[J.B. WOGAN]

We have a viewer who says; absolutely women's issues, issues in marginalized communities, immigrants, these are some of the curricula to address, thank you for that comment.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Let me make, let me say something about that. It is so crucial to use solutions journalism with marginalized community coverage because the traditional way has been for a newspaper whose subscribers are mainly of the white suburbs, to cover a community of color, purely through the lens of crime. You're not covering a community for it, you're covering, you're writing about it for your white audience. And that has got to change. It is so toxic. It has set a narrative that is racially unjust and it underlines all other sorts of racial injustice. These are communities that never see themselves reflected or respected in the news. Same is true with rural areas. People go to Kentucky and they look for people with four teeth, journalists do, and that's totally unfair. And we have to cover marginalized communities in a different way, one that looks for what those communities are doing to solve their own problems.

[J.B. WOGAN]

That actually brings it to another question that I've gotten, which is about your media diet. And it reminds me a little bit, I mean, one of the publications I subscribe to and read is Next City which does seem to cover a lot of examples of what you're talking about where communities are generating though own solutions and advancing equity in that way. But what are you reading and is it, I guess in particular, what solutions journalism stories are you reading?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

There's one I adore that was actually started by David Byrne, yes, that David Byrne. And he writes for it too. It's called Reasons to be Cheerful, which is this lovely whimsical title that only could come from David Byrne, but they do excellent solutions journalism. So I would, I recommend that site. It's a lot of fun. And when you run into David Byrne, which is pretty cool. On the other end, almost everybody's doing solutions journalism these days, at least some of it. The New York Times does a lot of it and does it very well. They probably don't call it solutions journalism, but they do it. Any news organization that is part of the fear factory, that is really there to create more polarization and profit from that, is not interested in solutions journalism. Everybody else is. And does a lot of it. But if you, look in our story tracker, that's open to everybody, and you can see there's some news organizations that have hundreds of pieces in the tracker.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Another question I've gotten is about, and some of the other resources on your website, the Impact Tracker for example, I mean Mathematica does a lot of the valuations where we are actually conducting impact evaluations. Could you talk a little bit about what the Impact Tracker does or what it is?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Yeah, we have also a Playbook about how to, for newsrooms on how to track impact. Impact is so difficult, because there's so many different ways you can think about it. Does it help a newsroom gain more audience? Does it help a newsroom gain more trust from the audience? And more community involvement? Is there impact in the community in the sense of something that's being tried elsewhere is now being discussed here? Is there accountability where something happens at the political level because of investigative slash solutions journalism? Is there a way that a newsroom makes revenue from solutions journalism?

Which is hugely important because we've lost more journalism jobs over the last 10 years than coal mining jobs and people probably know that a quarter of all newspapers in the United States have folded. So I mean, journalism is severely endangered because of the death of advertising because of Google and Facebook. And so money is really, really important. So, I mean there's many different ways of looking at impacts so our impact tracker is just collecting anecdotes. It's easy to track certain kinds of those impacts, like newsroom engagement and numbers, it's very hard to track what happens in the real world as a result of solutions journalism. We depend on people to send that in.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Then the Learning Lab is another resource you all have, right? So the Learning Lab is for aspiring journalists, current journalists, anybody? How do you think about that?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Anyone who's interested in solutions journalism and we have the 101 course, which is now in 14 languages, so if you only speak Hungarian, you're probably not listening to this, but you can do the Learning Lab in Hungarian, or Swahili, or Arabic, or whatever. We also have more advanced courses in health reporting, criminal justice reporting, environmental reporting, being an editor for solutions journalism, doing collaborative solutions journalism, already mentioned impact, broadcast, all sorts of different smaller slices of solutions journalism. But these are self-paced courses, they're you know, you can do them at your leisure. We also have a 101 webinar every month that anybody can sign up to go to. It's one hour long. And then we have more advanced programs, like a brainstorming session and workshops and stuff like that.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Do you ever work with people in communications because it does seem to me like there's, there are some times going to be parallels where the folks who work in communications for a research outlet or for a university, are thinking through some of the same questions about how to share the story of this solution, how to make it compelling but also be accurate, is that, have there been any partnerships or collaborations in the past with people in communications?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

No, and there's a very specific reason for that, J.B., which is when we started, we were really afraid that people would label solutions journalism as public relations.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

And people still do, wrongly. But therefore, we did not want to work with publicists and communications people. We really wanted to stay on the newsroom side of it, working with the journalists themselves.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah, I can understand that. Yeah, I would still encourage anyone who works in communications who's listening to this podcast, to listen, or to check out some of these online courses because I have found that there are some lessons there applicable for writing press releases or talking to journalists or just even just engaging with your own research colleagues about how do we make the findings the most interesting and relevant as possible. Let's see, just trying to think if there's, what else should people check out? Are there any -- if people want to learn more about you or about the Network's work, where should they go?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Well, our website's pretty complete and you can look, not just about our trainings, but all sorts of other things. International work, we have trainers all around the world, so it's not just U.S. focused. But spend some time browsing the website and the story tracker, which I think is much more interesting actually, for the layperson. I used to, when I do newsroom trainings, I used to talk about the story tracker at the beginning, but then I realized that was a huge mistake because people would just sit there and play with it for the next hour and totally tune me out. But it's really addictive and a great way to start your day if you're tired of the negative headlines.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah, I mean, you had mentioned sort of people tuning out, I remember there was a really good Op Ed, I think it was last year in the Washington Post by a journalist.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

Amanda Ripley.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Was it Amanda Ripley? Okay, yeah, where she confesses to consuming less news than she ever has before and then talking about how that solutions journalism can be an answer to that fatigue. But I would encourage folks to check out that Op Ed because it resonated with me, I used to be somebody who would listen to NPR's first podcast every morning and then some other things as well. But midway through the pandemic I found it was just really difficult to --

[TINA ROSENBERG]

It's just too hard. Yeah.

[J.B. WOGAN]

And then, another question, I guess this is actually this is, I was thinking this is similar to the one I asked, but I think it's slightly -- to Tina, in academia we do lots of work in the lab and our work remains in paper. So I think what she's saying is, like in a peer reviewed paper perhaps, how can evidence journalism or solutions journalism and, or how can these reporters who practice evidence based journalism, how can they collaborate with academics? So, if you're a researcher, take out that bothersome comms professional who's pitching you, but if it's just a researcher who wants to talk to you about their work, how can they connect with you or work with you?

[TINA ROSENBERG]

That's a good question, and I think I would argue with what you just said about taking the comms professional out of it. Because they know more about how to pitch to journalists. The problem with being a researcher is that you are an expert, and that means almost by definition, you do not know how to talk to non-experts. But a comms professional does. And some of them are terrible but a lot of them are pretty good. So I would say, don't throw those people aside, and just make sure that you're pitching research that you can explain and is relevant and it doesn't have to have a super strong conclusion, but it has to be strong enough so that the reporter and the editor would say, this is something we need to report on.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay, well I'm mindful of time, it's 2:59, we've gotten some great questions today, I really appreciate everyone joining us and Tina, I really appreciate you.

[TINA ROSENBERG]

It's been a pleasure, thank you.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah, thank you so much for giving your time to us. For more information on the Solutions Journalism Network, visit solutionsjournalism.org. As we’ve mentioned, they have a bevy of free resources there. I encourage you to check them out. And thanks to everyone for joining us today for this live recording of On The Evidence, the Mathematica podcast. If you're new to the show, if you’re a first timer, consider subscribing. We're on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcasting apps, and you can learn more about us at Mathematica.org/ontheevidence.