The goal of this journalistic approach is to present people with a truer, more complete view of these issues, helping to drive more effective citizenship.
Simply reporting on problems, some research shows, can reduce citizens' sense of efficacy, leading them to disengage from public life.
[2] Solutions journalism posits that reporting on ways that problems are being addressed can increase engagement among audiences, enhances a sense of efficacy, and fosters constructive discourse around controversial issues.
Solutions journalism practitioners say the approach augments and complements the press' traditional watchdog role, presenting citizens with a more complete view of issues.
Some journalism critics observed that the governing assumptions of traditional journalism—anchored in the belief that a reporter's job is to expose wrongdoing[4]—might not be universally valid.
Civic journalism, which gained some momentum in the United States in the 1990s, seeks to engage readers in public discourse in order to encourage active participation in the democratic process and catalyze change.
Over the years, they demonstrated solutions-based editorial lines -with newspapers like Libération, Ouest-France, TV programs like TF1- generate audiences and interest among citizens.
Worldchanging, an online magazine founded in 2003, declared its approach to reporting on and debating environmental issues to be based in the coverage of solutions.
[11] In the beginning of 2010, Robert Costanza, David Orr, Ida Kubiszewski and others, launched Solutions,[12] a non-profit print and online publication devoted to showcasing ideas for solving the world's integrated ecological, social, and economic problems.
[14][15] Rubryka was founded in 2018 by Anastasia Rudenko, a Ukrainian journalist, as a socio-political online media with an emphasis on the topics of ecology, urbanism and women's rights.
Positivas based in Argentina is the first BCorp certified media in Latin America, and has been working to pioneer Construction Journalism on radio and multimedia content online since 2003.