Summary
Solutions journalism is a shift in how media covers the world. It focuses on what the news misses most often: how people are trying to solve problems and what we can learn from their successes or failures.
Dispatches endeavours to take this approach to story selection and treatment. It’s not endless ‘good news’ but it is an often missing recognition that there are some glimmers of hope and light amidst the regular programming of doom and gloom.
Solutions
by Bramwell Ryan
Eighteen shot on bus in Pakistan; 32 blown-up in Iraq; 3 reporters kidnapped in Columbia; 16 dead, 202 wounded in Syria; protestors dragged off islands in East China Sea; intense bombing in Gaza; police shoot 4 miners in South Africa; car bomb kills 12 in Sri Lanka; 22 children seized by Boko Haram; 16 women raped in Goma; adulterer stoned in Sudan; thief’s hand cut off in northern Mali; inmate executed in Texas; 3 burn to death in Lhasa; tanks crush 2 protestors in Tajikistan; Hamas fires rockets in to Tel Aviv; mass grave found in Chechnya; temple rampage kills 12 in India; guard shoots three co-workers in Mississippi; 1,000 suicides in UK linked to economy; 4 soldiers die after hitting IED on peace keeping mission; farmer killed in land seizure in Zimbabwe; drone attack kills 28 in Yemen; sniper hits 4 in Lebanon; 2 dead after banlieue rioting in Paris; pirates shoot 3 in Gulf of Aden raid; 6 squatters killed in Brazil; 24 teens beheaded in Mexico; two knifed of northern Saskatchewan; drunken brawl kills 8 in Siberia; immigrant swarmed by skin heads in Palermo…
When I was in journalism school a professor defended gloomy coverage since only rare events make it into the headlines.
Perhaps we don’t yet need to report that 22,438 airplanes landed safely yesterday but in some parts of the world the fact that “no one died violently” is rare enough to make it onto A1 in 120 pt type.
There is more happening in the world than death, destruction, chaos, things going wrong, screw-ups, graft, dishonesty and malice. But you’d never know from the news.
