How Context News used solutions journalism to focus on the future of specific crops

About the news outlet

• Founded in 2022, Context is based in the UK. It is a non-profit news organisation, under the umbrella of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 
• It aims to provide news and analysis that contextualises how critical issues and events affect ordinary people, society and the environment.

About the project

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

Food insecurity was a topic we had already covered extensively in the past. We were excited to tackle the topic from a solutions perspective and utilise the global reach of our newsroom. 

Which under-reported subjects and which different angles of already-reported concepts did you aim for in your projects?

A lot of attention is focused on problems in the Global South, but there isn’t enough emphasis on solutions emerging from the region. When solutions are focused on, they often lack depth,  investigation, criticism or analysis. We wanted to use this project to go deep on the nuances related to food security and use solutions as a jumping-off point into deeper analysis. We also wanted to focus on more obscure crops - like soy, millet, sorghum - which are not covered as much as the staples, but are important, and fascinating nonetheless. 

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

First and foremost, the grant gave us additional resources to travel and spend time with people in remote regions of the world. For example, we were able to visit a smallish island in Indonesia where a Sorghum farmer nicknamed “Mama Sorghum” was working with local NGOs to advocate for growing and eating the climate-resilient crop as an alternative to rice. 

How did applying solutions journalism affect your newsroom and team? 

We have covered food security issues in the Global South in the past, but by narrowing in on the future of specific crops, and focusing on responses to things like conflict, climate change and consumer habits, it allowed us to find new angles in previously covered areas. 

Did solutions journalism change engagement with your audience in any way? 

Taking a Solutions Journalism approach to our stories gave us new opportunities to engage with our audience. For example, episodes of our video series used calls to action to ask our audience which crops they would like us to cover. In one case we were able to follow up with reporting based on an audience suggestion. 

The Rerooted package was shared widely across social platforms. Having the entire series live in one place, allowed us to repromote the series as a whole, after individual stories had been published. 

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

The biggest initial challenge was dividing up the reporting across our newsroom so that we covered a wide range of crops, regions and subject areas. This required a lot of initial coordination prior to the reporting and production process. 

During the production phase, the video series faced a number of logistical challenges when it came to coordinating travel. Not only were we juggling the logistics of travel and visas, but also trying to time trips to various harvest seasons in different countries. 

What insights or lessons did you gain from this project? 

Prior to this project, many of us weren’t familiar with solutions journalism, even though we had all worked on solutions-focused stories in the past. An important insight for us was that this is not a markedly different approach to storytelling than what we have typically been used to. A lot of it came down to structuring stories and framing them slightly differently.

We also felt that this approach lent itself to visual storytelling. In video, we are often looking for people taking action - doing something that we can see and film. We found that was a natural outcome with solutions-oriented journalism, and they often revolved around strong characters and visual stories. 

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

The Rerooted series is a brilliant demonstration of how Context can approach the production of a series (both online print and video). We intend to showcase Rerooted in future funding proposals as we look to replicate this successful approach across other areas of our coverage. 

Since Rerooted launched, we have applied the SoJo approach to various other stories across our newsroom. 

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

We benefited greatly from having a network of reporters and fixers based in the regions we were covering. Working with local reporters, who are well versed in the region and subject areas added a depth to the story that would have been impossible to get from the outside looking in. This applies to all reporting, but with solutions journalism in particular, having that on-the-ground expertise gained us additional access to people and information so we could stress-test the solutions with more rigour.

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.

Header image by Nirbhay Kuppu (TRF)