With their project “Blue New deal", der Freitag highlights the ocean's potential as a major part of the solution to climate change

About the news outlet

• Founded in 1990, Der Freitag is based in Berlin, Germany. It is a national weekly newspaper, with a coverage area of about 26.000 printed copies
• ‘Anyone who reads Der Freitag is a person who not only wants to read, but also wants to think, feel and act in accordance with this’ - this is the inner compass for Der Freitag editorial team, with which they take a look at, categorise and question world events week after week and day after day.
• Der Freitag employs 28  staff members.

About the project

Why did you decide to embark on this solutions journalism journey?

We employed solutions journalism as the framework for our project to move beyond problem-focused reporting on climate change and ocean conservation. By adopting this approach, we aimed to highlight constructive responses to environmental challenges, providing our readers with actionable insights and fostering hope. In each story, we presented a social or environmental issue, and then explored a scalable solution, backing our findings with both scientific data and community experiences. We analysed the potential for global application of local successes, while transparently acknowledging limitations and challenges. This comprehensive approach allowed us to examine complex issues in a nuanced way, potentially increasing our audience engagement and inspiring action. Furthermore, the solutions-oriented framework aligned with our organisation's goals of building resilience and constructively shaping social debates. By focusing on what was working, rather than solely on problems, we sought to provide a more complete picture of ocean conservation efforts and their broader impacts on climate change and community well-being.

Which under-reported subjects and/or which different angles of already-reported topics did you aim for in your projects, have you succeeded in doing so and what was the result?

We sought to highlight the ocean's potential as a major part of the solution to climate change, rather than just a victim of it. Our focus was on stories from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, highlighting grassroots efforts which are often overlooked in mainstream media.

Our coverage included, for example, innovative marine conservation techniques like movable platforms to restore algae forests and large-scale coral restoration projects. We also reported on new approaches in sustainable aquaculture, like Integrated Multitrophic Aquaculture (IMTA) that create closed nutrient cycles. Furthermore, our project covered international efforts to create and enforce laws protecting the oceans, an often overlooked aspect of marine conservation. 

With our stories, we showed how protecting marine ecosystems can lead to poverty reduction and improved livelihoods in coastal communities. Additionally, we highlighted how some ocean conservation projects are creating new opportunities for women in coastal communities. By focusing on these subjects, we managed to provide a more comprehensive and solutions-oriented view of ocean conservation efforts and their broader impacts on climate change, economic development, and social well-being.

In what ways has the grant impacted your reporting and contributed to amplifying voices and solutions from the Global South? 

Without the grant, we wouldn’t have been able to research and report in such depth and extent that we were able to. The financial and topical support of our mentor has greatly helped to work with the given material extensively and also produce, in addition to the written articles, a five-part podcast series, multiple videos and a travelling exhibition that helps to amplify the voices from the Global South.

How did applying solutions journalism affect your team?

Applying solutions journalism within our team helped us to stay afloat and not drown in hopelessness while researching a topic that creates so many devastating headlines these days due to our human activities. Having had the clear goal to look for solutions-oriented stories while still giving the bigger picture of all negativity not only helped our readers to stay interested but ourselves too.

Did solutions journalism change engagement with your audience in any way? How were the solutions journalism stories perceived by your audience?

While we didn’t get many responses from readers, the ones we got have been mostly positive and have highlighted that our goal of showing a bigger picture on a small-scale example has worked well.

What challenges did you encounter and how did you address them?

​​The algae story in the Philippines from the NGO Climate Foundation promised to solve many issues concerning climate change but didn't really seem to tackle them when we visited the project and also lied to us about their activities. Therefore for the story in the Philippines, we had to paint a rather troubling image of the project there instead of only showing positive solutions. 

And when researching multitrophic aquacultures it was difficult to pinpoint a location in the Global South where there is a good working example to be seen, as the developments of this solution are not as extensive as those being described and wished for by the scientists developing the concepts. The situation was resolved by choosing Madagascar as a place to report from and the story there proved to be different but nevertheless very well suited to the project and to the solutions journalism framework.

On a conceptual level, we experienced the challenge of creating an ocean series that covers all important aspects of ocean-based climate and environmental solutions and on the other hand, meeting the given restrictions of solutions journalism and the grant itself. Not every ocean-based climate solution is rooted in the Global South and linked to a social issue there. Also, some potential solutions are still in the planning or the experimental stage. We have been trying to harmonise our different requirements and challenges by implementing one or two features into our series that provide a broader perspective and include solutions from the Global North too.

It also turned out to be a challenge to cooperate with local writers and photographers from the countries of the projects we were planning to report about. Since style and standards of reporting differ, we sent writers from our team to do the assignments in Honduras and Kenya. In search of local photojournalists, we ended up hiring a French photographer living near Honduras and a Spanish photographer living in Kenya, who are both regularly working for European media.

What insights or lessons did you gain from this project? 

We not only learned a great deal about the dire situation of the state of the oceans but also about how difficult it can be to engage and mobilise people to learn about difficult and nuanced global problems and issues. Even with great effort we still felt that we should have focused even more on the promotion and dissemination of the stories than on the research and reporting.

Another learning point was that it is not only difficult to engage people to become interested in a solution and situation far away from their reality, but also that it was difficult for us to stay connected with the team working in different locations as well as with the people that we worked with in the Global South during our reporting phase.

To what extent do you plan to continue or expand your solutions journalism reporting practices beyond the grant period?

All of us realised that we want to continue to implement solutions journalism practices as much as possible in our reporting. While it will not be suitable for every story and every type of research we realised that it can create a better bond with the readers delivering understandable and actionable insights with a solution-oriented approach.

What advice would you give to other journalists or organisations interested in pursuing solutions journalism reporting on issues related to the Global South?

We believe that engaging journalistic stories do not only need a good strategy during research on how to balance solutions and limitations within the story but also a good plan on how and where to engage the designated readers or viewers with what material — words, visuals, images or sound alike. We also benefited greatly from a network of reporters and fixers on the ground that helped us gain true and unbiased insights.

About the Solutions Journalism Accelerator

The Solutions Journalism Accelerator is a programme by the European Journalism Centre (EJC) in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network delivering grant funding to support solutions-focused development journalism in European news organisations. The programme is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

For the purpose of this programme, 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.

While journalists usually define news as ‘what’s gone wrong’, solutions journalism tries to expand this notion by emphasising that ‘what works’ is also newsworthy. By adding rigorous, evidence-based coverage of solutions, journalists can tell the whole story.

Download our  free Solutions Journalism guides:

• Solutions Journalism: an introduction for journalists and newsrooms
• Solutions Journalism: 11 tough questions on how to do solutions journalism​
• Solutions Journalism: an introduction to solutions-focused development reporting

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Header Image: Fabian Weiss.