Solutions journalism is not journalism
Journalism that doesn’t intentionally seek the truth, that isn’t honest, sincere, and fueled by curiosity isn’t journalism. It’s a lie.
That statement may sound harsh, but it is the necessary starting point for understanding the ongoing transformation of American journalism. News in the United States has always wrestled with its twin obligations: to inform citizens with facts and to shape public understanding.
What has changed in the past three decades is that large advocacy organizations have succeeded in redefining the mission of local-market journalism – in print, on the radio and on television – in major cities away from government accountability toward what is now called solutions journalism.
This shift is not incidental—it is deliberate, organized, and funded.
Pull back and look at it for what it is, what it seeks to do, and why it has become part of the mainstream, and it begins to look familiar. That is because it is eerily reminiscent of earlier moments in American media when truth was subordinated to larger ideological or market imperatives, such as the yellow press of the early 1900s.
Give the audience what it wants, regardless of the “truth” that it selects to tell, and the revenue will follow.
Theory Versus Practice
The true problem with solutions journalism is that the journalists begin with the outcome, and source their way to that “truth” with “experts” that provide “information” that threads the story together.
The earliest origins of solutions journalism, which is a euphemism for “civic journalism” can be traced back to a Columbia Journalism Review article published in 1998, in which author Susan Benesch wrote, “Civic journalism promotes democratic participation by giving journalists direct involvement with the population they serve instead of staying a separate entity.”
Journalists, now in an activist role, no longer are held to the standard of balance, or seeing counter sources, differing perspectives, and data that would or could prove the hypothesis of these stories.
The formula is constructed this way:
Response: Creating a thesis based on a specific response to a social crisis.
Insight: Demonstrating what can be learned from the social crisis.
Evidence: Use of data or information that proves the thesis.
Limitations: The contextualizing of this information.
And while the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), the father of this bastardization of journalism, includes among its definition of “limitations” that this work, “doesn’t shy away from revealing shortcomings,” most solutions journalism builds such a strong case for whatever it is advocating that realities are often squashed by the proposed solutions.
The term “solutions journalism” may have been publicly formalized in 2013 when former New York Times staffers David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg launched the SJN. In its own words, SJN seeks to “rebalance the news” and that “solutions journalism is what audiences want.”
But the real story isn't the “success” of SJN—it's how quickly commercial publishers abandoned their independence for foundation cash.
In a recent round of funding, SJN created a “journalism revenue accelerator” with a cohort that included such publishers as Chicago’s Better Government Association, the Dallas Morning News, and the Baltimore Banner. From SJN’s report on that initiative, came this: “The way we are learning how to expand our journalism offerings and monetize them simultaneously is really revolutionary,” said Brittany Harlow, operations manager and senior journalist at Verified News Network (Oklahoma), one of the eight newsrooms that make up the first cohort.
Traditional newspapers and television stations that had operated for decades on advertising and subscription revenue suddenly started accepting philanthropic grants with explicit editorial requirements. Major commercial outlets—The Seattle Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Fresno Bee, The Detroit Free Press—that once prided themselves on editorial independence lined up for foundation money that came with strings attached.
Progressive funders promote solutions journalism because it reframes reporting around “what works” in advancing equity and social change, aligning news with preferred policy reforms. This contrasts sharply with the mission of government-accountability reporting, which answers only to the truth.
Think about some of the headlines from the Covid-19 era, the lockstep reporting from the mainstream on vaccination efficacy, from the benefits of lockdowns and the characterizations of “essential” and “non-essential” workers. Now think about the still-lingering impacts of this reporting, which was influential, and how deleterious that lack of authentic journalistic approach has been to society.
Accountability journalism seeks no outcome but truth, exposing failures of power regardless of ideology. Solutions journalism, by design, encourages advocacy-oriented storytelling, while watchdog reporting preserves journalism’s core responsibility: to pursue truth without fear, favor, or predetermined agenda.
Why isn’t there more focused reporting coverage on the persistent crises of homelessness, violent street crime, and murder in cities like Chicago, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.? Quite simply, because few are paying for that kind of coverage. Government-accountability reporting would focus there, but aside from a handful of outlets—The Center Square newswire among them—few seem to believe that rigorous coverage of these public policy failures matters to readers.
This cultural shift in journalism was unprecedented. Commercial media had always maintained a clear separation between business operations and editorial decisions. Publishers sold ads, editors made coverage decisions. That wall didn’t just crack—it collapsed.
The Revenue Sources: Familiar Faces
Publishers told themselves they were “diversifying revenue streams.” In reality, they were trading editorial control for financial survival. And once they got that first taste of foundation funding, they discovered something troubling: it was easier than building sustainable reader relationships.
There is an entire network of progressive funders – names you’ll recognize, if you’ve ever watched public television or listened to public radio – that are practicing solutions journalism with help of SJN.
The Editorial Transformation
Once metropolitan publishers accepted funding from advocacy organizations, their editorial priorities shifted predictably. Instead of primarily scrutinizing government actors, reporters were encouraged to highlight community groups, nonprofits, and public-private partnerships as “solution providers.”
The philosophical underpinning of this shift can be heard clearly in a 2024 speech at a TED event by National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maherv when she was CEO of Wikimedia Foundation: “Perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Yes, I am really stuck on those words. I’ve written about Maher’s speech before. I will continue to write her words because they continue to offer an out for any CEO or publisher to compromise the basic tenets of good journalism for predictable outcomes that do nothing for their audiences.
It is not genuine for journalists to convince readers in single-sided “straight-news” how to think. That is saved for the editorial page, labeled as “opinion,” thus carrying with it a clear message that this is an individual point of view.
Solutions journalism crosses that line, providing only selective truth, but presenting itself as fact. Truth, what most Americans would consider balanced reporting, itself became a stumbling block. Publishers embraced this framework because it justified taking foundation money while claiming they were still practicing journalism.
The Real-World ‘Results’
The pattern repeats across commercial outlets that accept foundation funding. Here are just a couple of examples, but there are thousands of others:
The Detroit Free Press focused on “telling city stories” as part of a grant that it received in 2019 from The Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation. In 2016, the Free Press accepted a grant through SJN to focus on children facing “toxic stresses” in their lives. The Free Press was part of a larger consortium of news organizations in Michigan and New York that participated in accepting grants to produce solutions-focused news.
The Seattle Times has taken in millions of dollars in donor contributions from such funders as the Gates Foundation, to focus on solutions journalism since at least 2013, when it began designating reporting and reporters to “labs” and “projects.” It took in millions more from the Ballmer Foundation in 2021 that coincided with a $38-million contribution to the University of Washington to focus on mental health. The paper calls it impact journalism in this video it published. Take a look at the local-reporting team at The Seattle Times, and you’ll see that 27% of the newsgathers at the Times have either a “lab” or “project” designation.
Elsewhere around the country, smaller startups, most of them nonprofits, have gone all-in with a focus on solutions journalism, and accepted what The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported to be $1.25 billion – some of which it says was taxpayer-funded, to support these initiatives.
These newsrooms didn’t stumble into foundation capture, they volunteered. Their publishers actively chose revenue – and, in some cases, their existence – over editorial independence.
Echoes of Yellow Journalism
This isn’t the first time commercial publishers abandoned truth-seeking for external incentives. In the early 1900s, publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer filled papers with sensational stories serving their political and commercial interests rather than the public good. The Spanish-American War demonstrated how journalism divorced from truth-seeking could manipulate public opinion toward catastrophic ends.
The parallels are striking:
External Control: Yellow journalism served publishers’ political and commercial ambitions over the job of informing the public. Today’s solutions journalism serves foundation agendas. In both cases, commercial publishers allowed outside interests to shape editorial decisions.
Truth as Secondary: Yellow journalism twisted facts for market ends. Solutions journalism selectively frames stories to emphasize funder-approved outcomes over objective reporting.
Publisher Complicity: Both movements required commercial publishers to actively participate in undermining journalism’s truth-seeking mission.
The difference lies in methodology, not result. Yellow journalism used sensationalism and fabrication to sell papers. Solutions journalism uses foundation-funded focus on the issues relevant to the funders to maintain financial viability. Both represent publishers and broadcast heads choosing external revenue over editorial integrity.
What Was Lost
When commercial publishers and broadcasters traded editorial independence for foundation funding, they lost the essential thing that made their journalism valuable: the ability to follow stories wherever they lead.
The real story under the defunding of the Public Broadcasting Corporation earlier this month wasn’t about taking away content from local-market stations. That’s not my perception at all. Rather, it was about taking away the taxpayer funding mechanism for the perpetuation of one-sided news coverage funded by all Americans.
Real journalism requires freedom to investigate anyone. It requires independence to criticize solutions that aren’t working, even when those solutions are favored by funders.
Most critically, it requires the adversarial relationship with power that makes journalism essential to democracy. When publishers accept funding with editorial requirements, that relationship becomes compromised. Citizens need reporters who will ask tough questions of city council members, school board officials, nonprofit executives, and foundation program officers.
Publishers told themselves they were saving local journalism. In reality, they were destroying what made journalism worth saving.
The Trust Collapse
The greatest irony is that funding solutions journalism probably has accelerated the trust crisis publishers were trying to solve. When readers realize coverage serves outside interests rather than meets expected editorial standards, skepticism naturally deepens.
Gallup polling confirmed in 2024 this trend: public trust of mass media (the largest brands in the production of news) has declined fastest in markets where foundation funding is most prominent.
Readers aren’t stupid—they recognize when publishers have compromised their independence for revenue.
In the end, the readers lose – and so do these publishers
The rise of solutions journalism represents commercial publishers’ willing surrender of editorial independence for foundation revenue. This wasn't forced upon them—they actively chose it.
We have been here before. Yellow journalism showed how dangerous publishers become when they abandon truth-seeking for external incentives. Solutions journalism is the modern iteration of that same choice.
Katherine Maher’s assertion that “reverence for the truth might be a distraction” didn't create this crisis—it simply articulated what commercial publishers had already decided. It lifted the lid on the BS. When publishers prioritize revenue over truth-seeking, they cease serving journalism’s democratic function.
The warning is clear: journalism that does not intentionally seek the truth is not journalism at all. And publishers who trade editorial independence for one-sided truth aren’t saving journalism—they’re destroying it.
Chris Krug is publisher of The Center Square, a national news organization focused on federal, state and local government accountability. The Center Square is published by the nonprofit Franklin News Foundation, which does accept philanthropic support from Foundations. Editorial independence is a prerequisite for all incoming grants. Donor information is not shared with the newsroom. Subscribe to receive updates on how we're changing the news landscape.