Too Long For Twitter…

@Chanders and @JonathanStray have taken my post on Solution Journalism and struck up a lively debate on Twitter. Which is excellent!

But my weigh-in to @Chanders’ response is a little too long for Twitter.

He writes: 

“By what right, and on what grounds, do journalists claim the authority to offer solutions to any particularly difficult problem? Journalists are neither elected, nor particularly accountable, nor all that expert in anything in particular.”

I never claimed, and never meant to imply, that journalists should offer the solutions. Quite the opposite. A journalist should simply document and curate the solutions that the public is already working on. Like this one. And this one. And this one.   And the work of these 2000+ Ashoka fellows. 

A journalist’s job is to accurately and fairly portray society. Ignoring this social activity is neither fair, nor balanced. As the Internet and tech scene exploded in the 1990s, the number of publications covering the scene increased along with it. But as activity in the social sector has gone way up, its journalism has stayed flat.  

In fact, I’d argue that the preponderance of problems in the media is simply another type of bias. And like David Altheide suggested in The Culture of Fear,  maybe that’s why the media is “distrusted by nearly everyone.”

One good point, though: we’ve often wondered if the word “solution” is too strong. We’ve wavered between “reporting on social innovation” and “solution journalism,” and stuck with the latter for now, because it’s short and to the point. But what do you think? Other ideas? Let’s throw them out.