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Report: Leveraging Solutions Journalism for Revenue Growth

Solutions Journalism Network (2021), 11 pp.
"The Solutions Journalism Revenue Project (SJRP), which ran between February 2020 and February 2021, aimed to explore how a diverse range of newsrooms could leverage solutions journalism to generate revenue. Among the questions the project sought to answer were: Can reporting on responses to social problems help newsrooms attract financial backers and contribute to their economic sustainability? Is there a business case that supports this journalistic practice? Over the yearlong project, we gathered both quantitative and qualitative evidence indicating that producing solutions journalism can help news organizations bring in revenue. We are particularly heartened by this outcome given the extraordinary challenges faced by newsrooms across the industry this past year, including COVID-19 and urgent news issues, such as the movement for racial justice and the presidential election, that demanded significant attention from already stretched newsroom staff. Our partner newsrooms’ dedication to experimenting with and keeping the focus on solutions journalism is testimony to its value in advancing their revenue objectives and larger goals of serving communities with a different approach to producing information that is in the public interest. The takeaways below reflect results from SJN’s work, both with the 12 U.S.-based newsrooms that formed the yearlong SJRP cohort and with numerous other newsrooms we’ve worked with outside the cohort where data and insights are relevant to this report." (Introduction, page 1)
1 Introduction, 1
2 About the Revenue Project, 3
3 Solutions Journalism-Related Revenue, 6
4 Conclusion, 11