The news is often quite good at being bad — as in deeply negative and depressing.

This systemic negativity in news coverage, in one estimation, has gone from being “a mere ‘news value’ to an overarching ‘news ideology.” And it’s not without consequence: It’s leaving audiences increasingly overwhelmed, frustrated, and apathetic, not to mention feeling helpless, stressed, and all the other emotions you may have felt if you were a heavy news consumer during 2024, just to name a year with plenty of anxiety-inducing news in it. It’s true that humans are wired to be more attentive to bad news, but it’s also true that one of the big turn-offs for audiences is that news tends to focus so heavily on problems and not enough on solutions.

Enter solutions journalism (also called constructive journalism), an approach to news reporting that emphasizes how people are working to solve significant challenges in communities. In its idealized form, solutions journalism (or SOJO) has four main elements: (1) a specific response to a significant social issue, (2) evidence showing what’s working (or not), (3) insights and lessons learned that can be used by others, and (4) an acknowledgment of limitations. The goal is to encourage civic engagement, rebuild trust in media, and develop more productive dialogue in communities.

Research has shown that solutions-oriented coverage can have positive impacts on emotions, empowerment, public knowledge, and intentions to engage with news, among other things. Although certainly not conclusive, such evidence hints at the possibility that SOJO could reconnect journalists with their communities — and, as a result, could deliver that elusive thing that news organizations have been searching for: an innovation that improves the quality of journalism and makes it more economically sustainable through revenue growth.

But how feasible is it to implement solutions journalism, particularly for smaller, resource-strapped news organizations that serve local communities? Our lead item this month — “Fighting Against the Machine: Inside a Solutions Journalism Campaign in U.K. Local Newsrooms,” published in Journalism Studies by Daniel Jackson, Antje Glück, and An Nguyen — tackles that question with a unique set of methods.

Over the course of 18 months, the researchers helped introduce solutions journalism into the U.K. local news industry through a pandemic recovery-related campaign. They partnered with four publishers representing in total several hundred regional and local news brands in the U.K., allowing them to study a mix of large, medium, and small local news outlets with various business models. The aim was to have one or two journalists per news organization trained in solutions journalism techniques, and those journalists would then act as future mentors for others in their newsroom. Participating journalists, it was hoped, would produce two solutions-focused stories per month. In the end, 51 journalists from 47 local and community news brands took part in the training — but of these, only 30 published at least one SOJO article, and 170 SOJO stories in total were produced.

The researchers studied these articles, interviewed most of the reporters and editors involved in the project to examine their reflections, and also made observations from meetings, forums, and WhatsApp groups that featured comments about SOJO by the mentors who had been trained. In all, Jackson and colleagues acknowledged they were “personally invested in the success of this project,” which makes their candor about the shortcomings of the SOJO initiative all the more noteworthy.

They found that SOJO was enthusiastically embraced by all the journalists they spoke with; reporters and editors saw it as a means of connecting with audiences and enhancing their democratic role. But this is key: There were major obstacles that impeded actual implementation. First, much like resource constraints on investigative journalism for smaller newsrooms, there often wasn’t enough time for journalists to research and source SOJO stories (notably, the issue of time, the authors note, is something that hasn’t received sufficient attention in industry or academic discussion of SOJO). Second, they found that trying to produce a SOJO story didn’t fit with the institutionalized newsroom model built around metrics, which leads toward “a negative, sensationalist and ‘soft news’ agenda.” As a result, it was a struggle to prioritize SOJO stories in everyday workflows. And, third, most editors, even if they felt positively about SOJO, “left journalists to pursue this innovation on top of their existing workload,” and so the initiatives foundered.

“These findings,” the authors write, “suggest that despite good intentions and the will to enact cultural change, many journalists found that incorporating SOJO meant fighting against a machine that is programmed for speed and volume of outputs over depth and investigation.”

The authors call this a chicken-and-egg conundrum for the U.K. local news industry: On the one hand, to stay culturally relevant and financially sustainable amid changing technology and audience habits, newsrooms need to embrace innovation — there is no other option, really. And that means having a supportive environment that provides journalists with encouragement and runway for experimenting with new ideas. But on the other hand, “the very problem that innovation aims to tackle — the decline of local journalism — is itself a tremendous barrier to innovation: it leads to a risk-averse attitude towards innovations that might not have an immediate business benefit but could sustain their democratic and commercial values in the long term.”

And so, while the researchers found strong support for solutions journalism as an innovation at virtually all levels of the operation — from higher-ups to front-line journalists — there were not enough institutional incentives for it to take hold in local newsrooms in the U.K. Presumably, we’d find similar results in other countries with similar media systems.

One of the study’s solutions journalism mentors captured the essence of this challenge — indeed, we could say it’s the challenge for legacy news media writ large — in a WhatsApp comment included in the study: “The big picture issue is the broken business model of traditional media especially at a local level. SOJO is one of many ways that audiences could be served better, which would start to address the trust and revenue issues — but we are not at a point where legacy media are prepared to reimagine how journalism is done. They are firmly aboard a sinking ship. They are trying to patch the leaks, but it will keep sinking without more systemic change.”

OK, that’s the bad news. Here’s the good news…

The study found that solutions journalism could be adapted to fit existing newsroom workflows through a scaled-down version the researchers call “SOJO lite.” This pragmatic approach balances enthusiasm for SOJO with the realities of resource-limited conditions. It may be only a partial version of what proponents like the Solutions Journalism Network argue need to be in place to deliver real solutions reporting — but “SOJO lite” is still better than “SOJO nothing,” the authors argue: anything that helps news organizations shift their mindset toward constructively addressing audience needs has merit. “And more practically,” they write, “it might be the only way that SOJO can be successfully integrated into badly resourced newsrooms and become truly mainstream.”

Research roundup

“News subscription motivation: Why audiences pay for news.” By Weiyue Chen and Esther Thorson, in Journalism & Communication Monographs. There may be no research question that has occupied as many resources in newsrooms over the past decade than what motivates people to pay for news? It seems to be an object of such fixation not only because it’s so important to news organizations’ survival, but because its answers can seem so elusive. Previous research has identified a variety of factors associated with paying for news (or the willingness to hypothetically pay for news), including exclusivity and publication prestige, concern about journalism’s fiscal crisis and watchdog function, preference for digital format, and sense of news use as a factor in social status, in addition to predictable concerns about price, media trust, and general news interest.

Those are all helpful insights, but Chen and Thorson found they lacked an overarching framework tying all these motivational factors together. In a remarkably thorough and rigorous monograph, they conducted three studies — an initial set of qualitative interviews, plus two surveys — to develop an integrated concept they called news subscription motivation and tie it to people’s real-life decisions to pay for news (or not).

They built their framework on the concept of consumer decision-making style, drawn from marketing theory — a set of pre-existing orientations (around things like quality, price, brand, novelty, habit, and so on) that consumers bring to purchasing decisions, which correspond to particular motivations. They used the three studies to develop a cohesive set of motivations for news subscriptions, then tested how much of each of those motivations predicted the number of news publications paid for and the amount they paid.

They identified six clusters of motivations: supporting journalism, journalism quality, being triggered by the paywall, community attachment, affordability, and content utility. The three factors that best explained people’s news subscription habits were supporting journalism (associated with a belief in journalism’s social importance and a desire to improve its prospects), journalism quality (which respondents characterized as credibility, lack of bias, and thorough reporting), and being triggered by the paywall. Community attachment came through as a secondary factor, one that was only significant in local subscriptions, not national ones.

There were all kinds of interesting nuggets scattered across the three studies in this publication, but as a practical takeaway for news organizations, Chen and Thorson suggested that their framework could provide a useful tool for organizations to test among their own audiences. For those publications, the scale, they concluded, “can provide useful insights about their own existing consumers and identify possibly powerful strategies to prevent them from canceling their subscriptions.”

“Is partisan selective exposure an American peculiarity? A comparative study of news browsing behaviors in the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong.” By Tetsuro Kobayashi, Zhifan Zhang, and Ling Liu, in Communication Research. Within the U.S. context, the notion that many people’s news consumption is significantly shaped by their desire to be exposed to news that fits their political views is taken as a fundamental factor defining the media environment. That phenomenon, which scholars call partisan selective exposure, has been repeatedly shown as a prominent dynamic in the U.S. But research has shown it to be less prevalent (though generally still present) elsewhere in the world, whether that’s Germany, Japan, Italy, or Poland.

Is partisan selective exposure, as Kobayashi and colleagues wondered, “an American peculiarity”? And if so, why? This study set out to confirm the research showing lower partisan selective exposure in other countries and test whether a few factors that researchers have hypothesized over the years are related to those differences. In two experiments conducted in the U.S., Japan, and Hong Kong, they set up a mock news site with headlines that might conform with various political ideologies, then tested which headlines people clicked and how long they read given a limited amount of time.

Sure enough, partisan selective exposure was significantly higher in the U.S. in both studies, moderately present in the Hong Kong, and almost nonexistent in Japan. To find out why, the authors tested three different potential explanatory factors: 1) Affective polarization, or the idea that negative feelings toward political outgroups are more widespread and becoming stronger in the U.S.; 2) political parallelism and credibility, or the idea that partisan selective exposure is higher where media is fairly aligned with partisan interests, resulting in lower media credibility; and 3) the dialectical self and low cognitive dissonance, which posits that partisan selective exposure is an effort to limit cognitive dissonance, which is less common when people are more able to accept contradiction, as has been shown in East Asia.

All three explanations are plausible and have some evidence supporting their viability, but the authors found that only affective polarization was significantly related to the differences in levels of partisan selective exposure, indicating that the U.S.’s abnormally high levels of negative emotions toward political opponents may be a primary driver of partisan-based news consumption. But even when controlling for that factor, the U.S. still exhibited higher levels of partisan selective exposure, hinting that other unexplored factors also help make the U.S. an outlier when it comes to partisan-motivated news consumption.

“Effects of over-time exposure to partisan media and coverage of polarization on perceived polarization.” By Michael Heseltine, Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Tomasz Gackowski, and Magdalena Wojcieszak, in Political Communication. Like in the previous study, these authors were also interested in finding out a reason for another truism of the modern political environment — that societies are becoming more politically polarized. Or, more specifically, that many people, across countries and political orientations, perceive their society as becoming more polarized.

Polarization is indeed increasing across many countries, but there’s evidence that it’s actually being outpaced by the perception of polarization, particularly among more extreme partisans. Heseltine and his colleagues put forward two possible explanations for that perception to test their relative strength: Increased partisan media consumption and increased media coverage of polarization as an issue.

Using a three-wave survey of more than 4,000 people in the U.S. and Poland, they received nine months of web browsing data from respondents, measuring their actual (not just self-reported) media consumption habits alongside their perceptions of polarization, both in society at large and compared with their own political views.

They found, first of all, that news coverage of polarization is fairly common, though heavier in partisan media and spiking when major political events suggest strong divides in the political system. Perhaps surprisingly, they found that neither that polarization news coverage nor partisan media consumption in general had any effect on people’s perception of societal polarization broadly.

But perception of personal polarization — how different the political out-group’s opinions were from one’s own — was very different. Here, polarization coverage was significantly likely to lead people to perceive their own views as more distant from their political opponents, regardless of whether that coverage was in partisan or centrist media. The effect for polarization coverage was even stronger than it was for partisan media consumption generally.

This data doesn’t let partisan media off the hook for polarizing effects, the authors noted. Yet they concluded that the critiques of negative, conflict-based political news in mainstream media seem to be validated here, as their study indicates that it may do real political damage. “It is the general news media focus on clashes between opposing views and inter-party hostility that is at least partly to blame for the growing perceptions of polarization,” they wrote.

“The harming and the helping: Perceived organizational effects on mental health in the newsroom.” By Kayli Plotner and Patrick Ferrucci, in Digital Journalism. You certainly don’t need us to tell you that journalists’ collective mental health has been in an increasingly precarious state over the past decade or so. Academics have produced a variety of excellent studies examining numerous potential factors, from covering traumatic topics to harassment to increasingly insecure jobs. In one helpful addition to this work, Plotner and Ferrucci zeroed in one particular category of influences on journalists’ mental health: organizational culture and systems.

They interviewed 67 journalists, all working in newsrooms of at least 10 people, in order to focus on organizational factors. They found four primary organizational factors that either helped or harmed journalists’ mental health: profit orientation, social media policies, the organization’s perceived level of precarity, and perceived level of support from the organization’s leadership. A strong profit orientation, predictably, was a negative influence on mental health, especially if journalists believed it was hindered the quality of their work. “My problem happens when I’m working for a place that just doesn’t care about journalism should be,” one journalist said. “It makes you question whether I’m doing the right thing (being a journalist).”

Precarity was a related concern — several journalists described in vivid terms their stress over fearing that they could lose their job at any moment, something they largely attributed to their organization’s ownership. “I bring negativity to every interaction because I know tomorrow, I might need to learn how to collect unemployment,” said one journalist.

Like other recent work, the study also found a significant role for social media policies. Specifically, if news organizations allowed journalists more choice on whether and how they engaged with social media, it tended to have a positive effect on their journalists’ mental health as they could choose to opt out of the harassment they endured there.

And another significant positive factor in some cases was a sense that journalists’ editors and managers were transparent, trustworthy, and understanding. But in order for that to become a factor, journalists also needed to perceive those managers as having some control. Even in the case of a sympathetic supervisor, “when journalists perceive their newsroom leader or leaders to be powerless when it comes to important decisions,” their cynicism gets free rein: “Journalists believe all decisions made are in search of economic gain, and not civic gain and the results on the organization’s culture are decisively negative.”

“Scrolling headlines and clicking stories: Content differences and implications associated with increased scrollability of news.” By Jessica T. Feezell, Kathleen Searles, John K. Wagner, Joshua Darr, Ray Pingree, Mingxiao Sui, and Brian Watson, in Journal of Information Technology & Politics. The tensions between news organizations and digital media platforms are myriad, but one of the places the two are most directly at odds is in the scroll vs. the click: Social media news feeds are designed so that the act of scrolling, with the endless consumption it entails, is “both the means and the goal,” as the authors of this study put it. But to a news organization, in a news feed, news is only valuable “inasmuch as it is clicked.”

The fundamental aim, then, for news organizations is clear: How do you induce clicks in an environment that is designed to head off those clicks in favor of an endless scroll? Virtually every headline written in today’s news environment is operating downstream of that question. In this study, Feezell and her colleagues looked at the effects of various headline strategies in stopping scrolls to generate clicks, as well as any effects in political attitudes or behaviors on scrollers or clickers.

The authors tested this with a Google News-like portal they built for the study, populated with real news headlines and stories. They asked about 1,000 people to use the portal for a week, and surveyed them before and after that week. They found that people were more likely to click on negative headlines than neutral ones (there was no difference between positive and neutral headlines). Headlines with words connoting anxiety and sadness were more likely to be clicked, though, perhaps surprisingly, angry headlines had no effect on clicks. Correspondingly, sentiment analysis revealed the headlines news organizations wrote were more negative than the articles they accompanied.

That meant that, in general, those who just scrolled encountered a more negative news environment than those who clicked through to the (less negative) stories. More clicking vs. scrolling had no effect on political knowledge or inclination toward political participation, but there was a slight effect on affective polarization — that is, negative feelings toward political opponents. Clicking through led to lower affective polarization, but only for those with high political interest. Those results may indicate, the authors suggested, an effect of the more nuanced information in an article than a headline — but perhaps only for those interested enough to actually read through that nuance.