Solutions are a big part of alternative media’s environmental reporting but need consistent support, Concordia study shows

There’s no getting around it: staying on top of the world’s environmental challenges can be a grim experience. Climate change, floods, wildfires, collapsing biodiversity — it’s enough to turn many readers off the news entirely.

To push back against this relentless tide of negativity, some journalists engage in a practice called solutions journalism. This approach uses standard journalistic methods to present behaviours, actions and strategies that can mitigate, reverse or help us adapt to environmental damage: in other words, offer solutions to existing problems.

There has been a noticeable shift in the Canadian media landscape toward solutions journalism over the past decades, and leading that transition are the country’s independent alternative media outlets.

In a paper published in the journal Environmental Communication, two Concordia researchers study the frequency of solutions journalism in environmental reporting in seven Canadian alternative media outlets. Through content analysis and interviews with reporters, the researchers found that the practice requires strong institutional support, even when climate journalism is an integral part of a given outlet’s coverage.

“If a newsroom does not have an environment that is nurturing toward solutions journalism, it won’t happen, even in organizations like alternative media outlets where it is part of their mission,” says study co-author Amélie Daoust-Boisvert, an associate professor in the Department of Journalism.

“Even with training and discussions in editorial meetings, reporters are constrained by their daily routines and the pressures of the job. Nevertheless, solutions journalism fits some media better than others, depending on their audience and orientation.”

Arriving there by doing the job

The study, which builds on co-author Willow Beck’s 2023 MA thesis, uses a mixed-methods approach. The first phase consisted of a content analysis of all the journalism articles produced by seven alternative Canadian media outlets in 2022: The Tyee, Canada’s National Observer, The Narwhal, IndigiNews, The Discourse, The Sprawl and, in French, Pivot.

Of the near 4,000 items produced, some 1,700 pieces were identified as having connections to climate or the environment, or roughly 43 per cent. The researchers assessed the “solution-ness” of these articles according to definition of solutions journalism proposed by the Solutions Journalism Network.

For an article to be assigned solutions focused, it must: feature the response to an identified problem, offer insights that are more broadly applicable, include evidence that the solution is effective and list the response’s limitations.

A zero to four Likert scale was used to determine the degree of solution orientation for each article, with zero being “not at all” to four being “totally.” Of a subsample of about 250 articles, 17 per cent scored high, at three or four on the scale, which researchers found surprisingly low.

Follow-up interviews with seven reporters who signed those solutions stories revealed that journalists often did not set out to deliberately write solutions journalism. In fact, some said they were unaware they had written a solutions story: as far as they were concerned, they were just doing their day job.

“Most of them knew about solutions journalism and some might have had training in it or discussed it in meetings,” says Daoust-Boisvert. “But because the nature of alternative media requires them to differentiate themselves from legacy media, they often arrive at solutions journalism just by looking for different angles.”

While she acknowledges that good solutions journalism requires consistent support from publishers and managers, she adds that an increase in public interest in positive alternatives to the consistent messaging of climate gloom and doom can encourage newsrooms to pursue these kinds of stories.

“We’re not saying that everybody should be doing it or that it will solve the many crises facing journalism today, but I do believe it has its place in a good media diet.”

Read the cited paper: “Perfect as the Enemy of Good: How the Seeds of Solutions Journalism for Environmental Reporting Take Root in Canadian Alternative Media.”