By Maya Johnson
Solutions journalism is not about feel-good stories or focusing on local heroes, but a new approach to news features that moves from identifying problems to helping communities solve them, says Gretchen Macchiarella, a UC Santa Barbara alum and journalism educator. Macchiarella spoke recently to a group of UCSB journalism students about how emerging journalists can tackle specific issues and spur change through their writing.
“As reporters, we tend to look in. This [solutions journalism] trains us to look for comparisons instead. If you have this problem, does everybody have this problem?” said Macchiarella, professor of emerging journalism practices at California State University, Northridge.
Former UC Santa Barbara Daily Nexus student reporters Gretchen Macchiarella, Tony Biasotti (whom she later married) and Alexis Filippini in 1998.
Macchiarella graduated from UCSB in 2000, and got her start at the student-run Daily Nexus newspaper before going on to work at the Ventura County Star and later transferring to journalism education. She was speaking to the journalism track in UCSB’s Professional Writing Minor, a class that includes current Daily Nexus editor Pricila Flores and past Daily Nexus editor Atmika Ayer, among other students currently reporting for campus and Santa Barbara area news outlets.
Solutions journalism is a mode of reporting that focuses on responses to social problems. The goal of this type of reporting is to move from investigation to implementation, Macchiarella said. In an interactive Zoom presentation, she engaged students in a discussion on how emerging journalists can tackle pressing societal challenges — such as how cities deal with widespread mental illness or how a community can combat lead poisoning. Macchiarella encouraged the students not to focus on individual success stories — a creative school principal who turned around a low performing school, for example — but rather to research and expose remedies that might be applied to larger groups of people and several communities.
Cal State Northridge journalism professor Gretchen Macchiarella, left, and her husband Tony Biasotti, reunite with former colleague Alexis Filippini of the UCSB-based student-run Daily Nexus newspaper.
“The average citizen doesn't know what to ask for or what can change until you tell them,” Macchiarella said.
UC Santa Barbara Daily Nexus alum Gretchen Macchiarella mentors emerging journalists as assistant professor of Journalism at CSU Northridge.
Students in the Professional Writing Minor named climate change, fast fashion, the housing crisis, and fake news as areas where they might implement this journalistic method and help their audiences feel empowered.
Macchiarella offered avenues to find these kinds of stories, encouraging students to look into the Solutions Story Tracker, a reporting database created by the Solutions Journalism Network, a non-profit organization advocating for global implementation of this evidence-based mode of reporting. Under the topic of climate change, the Story Tracker hosts case studies from locations such as Ogun State, Nigeria where grassroots organization SecureCycle Initiative is converting discarded jean material into bookbags, or Medellín, Columbia where local engineers are using tree and plant-filled spaces to lower temperatures in a once forested city.
“We need to be clear about what we can learn from these issues,” said Macchiarella.
This socially-conscious approach to journalism is rapidly gaining popularity in newsrooms across America, said Macchiarella, particularly in non-profits such as Solutionaries and Prism. She stressed the importance of younger journalists incorporating this approach into their work.
Maya Johnson is a fourth-year Writing and Literature major at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.