Applications are now open for the Solutions Journalism Network Grant Program to support reporting projects that pursue solutions stories by investigating “positive deviants” in datasets.
The Solutions Journalism Network is awarding grants to support newsrooms pursuing solutions stories with a focus on positive deviants. They want to help news outlets that see the value of mining data to discover the places that outperform their peers, and then relish the task of digging in to investigate whether novel and replicable responses are driving that better performance. It could be a prison system with significantly lower recidivism compared to other prisons with a comparable inmate population; a state that has reversed poor health outcomes for vulnerable populations; a country that has greatly improved access to clean drinking water while comparable countries lag behind.
Solutions Journalism…
- Can be character-driven, but focuses in-depth on a response to a problem and how the response works in meaningful detail
- Focuses on effectiveness, not good intentions, presenting available evidence of results
- Discusses the limitations of the approach
- Seeks to provide insight that others can use