3 questions to Anna Patton

In each edition, we like to take you behind the scenes of our Solutions Journalism Accelerator. This time, we would like to share Anna Patton's work as an ambassador for solutions-based journalism in the UK. 
Anna is the associate editor and training lead at Pioneers Post, which covers the world of social enterprise, mission-driven business and impact investing. She is also an editorial advisor at Proximate, which covers participatory problem-solving; an accredited trainer of solutions journalism; and a freelance writer focused on social change and philanthropy.

1)  Can you walk us through your journey into solutions journalism?  

About 10 years ago I was writing about international development for Devex. My editor at the time often asked me to include insights that our readers could learn from – and a little later I realised this was one of the pillars of solutions journalism, as defined by SJN. I also realised that solutions journalism was one way of uniting my work as a journalist with my wish to contribute to positive change, so, in 2018 I joined SJN’s mentoring programme as a mentee. In the same year, I started working for Pioneers Post – like Devex, it was already strongly focused on uncovering solutions, but my links with SJN helped to make that more systematic. I have designed and led several solutions journalism workshops for reporters and content creators, invited SJN to deliver training to all my colleagues, and recently became an accredited solutions journalism trainer myself. At Pioneers Post we now try to be more explicit with our readers about what solutions journalism is and why we do it, for example through our Earth Fixers series. 

2) For your project, you recently organised an event on solutions journalism. Can you tell us more about it?

As a social enterprise ourselves, we want to make an impact on individuals and on our wider industry, by supporting the next generation of reporters – including those who don’t have access to expensive journalism degrees. Ultimately, we’d like to create year-long, paid apprenticeships for young people from diverse backgrounds, as well as providing more bespoke training in communications and impact storytelling for clients.

Our June event, “Good Stories: New narratives, bigger impact”, was a way of kicking this off. We wanted to test out demand for in-person networking and learning, start building our network, and position ourselves as key curators and enablers of brilliant, solutions-focused learning.  

 The event explored solutions journalism among other aspects of good storytelling. We had about 40 attendees and got some really positive feedback. It was easier than I expected to get great speakers on board – there is clearly a lot of interest in discussing and making progress on these topics. 

3) You also invited non-journalists to your event. Why do you think it is important for journalists and social innovators to collaborate? 

The event was aimed at journalists, students, social entrepreneurs and communications/PR people. While this made it slightly more challenging in terms of content – making sure that you’re catering to all these audiences – we felt it was really important to try to bring together these two sides of the coin, i.e. those creating the solutions and those reporting on them. Too often journalists don’t have time to get out from behind their desks, while there’s often misunderstanding and even suspicion among entrepreneurs about how the media works. So we hoped to bring people together to spark some mutually beneficial relationships and a better understanding of how to work together. We also made a big effort to invite students, offering free tickets and even funding towards their travel costs, although there was very little take-up of this – something for us to consider for next time.