Solutions Journalism Accelerator: a three-year journey

At the same time, a more-balanced, solutions-focused journalism can not only strengthen civic engagement, but also help media outlets meet the real needs of their communities, which is key to their financial sustainability.

To enable media organisations across Europe to carry out solutions-focused development journalism, the European Journalism Centre (EJC) partnered with the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) and provided more than USD $4m in grants, mentoring, coaching, resources and knowledge transfer in the last three years.

Solutions Journalism: an introduction to solutions-focused development reporting Resources

The Solutions Journalism Accelerator was created to achieve the following:

Purpose:

The Solutions Journalism Accelerator delivered grant funding, mentoring, coaching, resources and knowledge transfer to support solutions-focused development journalism in European news organisations.

Mission:

To create demonstrable impact on the public, key stakeholders and the media landscape through raising awareness of, and enabling media organisations to undertake more, solutions-focused development journalism.

Vision:

To inspire and enable all media organisations in Europe to build resilience through creating greater public awareness, critical understanding and positive social change about urgent global issues.

When we say solutions journalism we mean…

Rigorous and evidence-based reporting that primarily focuses on responses to societal problems. We define solutions journalism as a practice that investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, how people try to solve widely shared problems.

Achievements

We awarded 31 subgrants (19 media outlets, 12 freelancers)

All 19 media outlets received the support of a mentor who provided their mentee(s) with expertise in the field of solutions journalism, guidance, motivation, emotional support, directly or indirectly linked to the implementation of the grantee’s project.

Our mentors: Sophie Roland, Swati Tarafdar, Meera K, Sanne Breimer, Chibuike Alagbvoso, Anne-Sophie Novel, Lola García-Ajofrín, Shana Ghosh, Abaas Mpindi, Michèle Foin, Camille Padilla Dalmau, Catherine Edwards, Collectif Antidotes and Shirish Kulkarni

± 650 stories were published in total

Interested in finding out what our grantees wrote about?

5 impactful stories from our Solutions Journalism Accelerator grantees

Solutions Journalism Accelerator grantees: 5 positive change stories

Stories from our Solutions Journalism Accelerator grantees

Four more solution-focused stories from our grantees

Three guides on Solutions Journalism were published

Download for free:

Solutions Journalism: an introduction for newsrooms and journalists

11 Tough questions on how to do Solutions Journalism

An Introduction to solutions-focused development reporting

An Ambassador Network was created

The goal of the Ambassador Network was to facilitate knowledge exchange and potential collaborations for those who already practise and advocate for solutions-focused journalism and for those looking to learn more about it.

The ambassador network consists of 9 ambassadors to facilitate collaboration, knowledge exchange and explore the application of solutions-focused reporting in the 3 target countries (UK, France and Germany) of the programme. Our ambassadors: Shirish Kulkarni, Anna Patton, Carla Rosch, Pierre Leibovici/Jacques Trentesaux, Collectif Antidotes, Emilie Brouze, Jan Scheper, Alexandra Haderlein, Miriam Richter

More achievements:

23 newsletters, 26 blogposts and 6 case studies were published, online and in-person events were organised, EJC staff, mentors and ambassadors followed train-the trainers sessions organised by SJN and they are now accredited trainers in Solutions Journalism.

Our case studies

EJC will continue to support Solutions Journalism.

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Programme

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