EXPLORING SOLUTIONS: Ursinus class using journalism to help

EDITOR’S NOTE: Throughout the history of modern journalism, its practice has been to focus on explaining or exposing problems.

An article, or series of articles, broadcasts or posts outlined the issues, offered different perspectives and suggested something must be done to correct the problem.

That done, journalism often left addressing the problem to people in charge, be that Congress, the district attorney or the local town council, and moved on to the next issue. Professional journalists sometimes argued it is not our place to advance a policy agenda, in part because it could be seen as clouding the objectivity of our reporting.

But times are changing and, many argue, journalism should be changing with them.

One of those changes now being explored is something called “solutions journalism.”

The idea is pretty simple.

In addition to outlining and defining a problem or issue, those practicing “solutions journalism,” explore responses to problems: they find out who is trying to fix a problem, ask how the response works, and how well it is working.

Doron Taussig, a former journalist in Philadelphia, teaches a class in solutions journalism at Ursinus College in the Media and Communication Studies department.

Last semester, his students were put into small teams and asked to identify a community problem and a response to it.

What follows are products of that effort, published in partnership with MediaNews Group.

In this article Madison Kuklentz (2020), Gabriella DeMelfi (2021), and Thomas Garlick (2020) look at how one group works to improve environmental conditions in our area.