Covering COVID-19 in Europe through a solutions lens: Six insights from an editor at The Guardian
Are you a Europe-based journalist looking to do solutions reporting on COVID-19? Check out these tips below.
Amid coronavirus-fueled global fear and uncertainty, people want to know what they can do to ensure they are safe. Solid reporting on what’s working, from rapid testing to quarantine strategies, helps provide crucial information to individuals, communities and policymakers.
In this 60 minute webinar hosted by the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), Nina Fasciaux, SJN’s manager in Europe, and Lucie Černá program coordinator of Czech Republic-based Transitions Online, explored how journalists can cover responses to the pandemic, with an eye to solutions stories from Europe.
The webinar is immediately followed by a 30- minute Q&A with Mark Rice-Oxley, head of special projects at The Guardian and editor of The Upside, the newspaper’s solutions journalism vertical. Watch the full session, and check out Rice-Oxley’s six practical insights for journalists and newsrooms:
1. Start with the problem.
Solutions journalism asks “who’s doing it better at solving X problem?” and investigates how “better” happened. But Rice-Oxley says that journalists often forget to define the problem in the first place. “I get a lot of pitches from stringers and freelancers on a narrow aspect of the solution — an NGO that’s doing good work here, or a community group that’s reinvented the cafe — and it always makes me think, ‘Well, what’s the problem they’re trying to fix? Why should I believe that this one initiative is the magic bullet?”
Rice-Oxley advises journalists to start with the magnitude of the problem and look at who’s responded effectively. “Why are some cities in southern India so much better at finding solutions [to air pollution] than cities in northern India? Or they look at children and care and ask why is it that Denmark or Austria have better outcomes?”
2. Examine a “small slice” of the problem.
After clearly identifying the problem, solutions journalism goes further, deeply investigating a small slice of that problem. Rather than a general issue area — say, climate change — a solutions journalism approach works best when it zeroes in, for example, on air pollution, investigating success through specific factors — such as lowered costs, expanded access, or reduced racial disparities.
Rice-Oxley says small slices are especially important for COVID-19 coverage, which has “lots of different strands” to investigate. “If the problem was infection, why was it that Taiwan and South Korea were so much better than China or Iran in those early days? When it comes to critical care, why is it that Germany has so many fewer deaths? Is it a matter of testing, or is it a matter of beds and ventilators and ICU units?”
3. Be on the lookout for the positive deviants.
Some of the best solutions stories are framed through data — quantitative evidence of what’s working. SJN has a list of databases to help journalists find the positive deviant — a datapoint that suggests one city, country, or institution is faring better than others, offering a fruitful starting point for reporting.
Rice-Oxley references two examples. “Why is it that women in Botswana only have two children per household, while women in Kenya or Niger have six or seven? What is it that’s different?” he asks, referencing one of The Upside’s first solutions stories. For COVID-19 coverage, Rice-Oxley adds that this story on Taiwan’s containment successes started with looking at numbers by country.
4. Hold power to account by showing who’s doing it better.
Highlighting the positive deviant, Rice-Oxley says, puts pressure on those in power. If we find out why one country or city did it better, “we can pressure our own governments who, let’s face it, are having a tough time dealing with this,” Rice-Oxley says. “We can say, ‘Well, you say it’s difficult to roll out enough tests, but Taiwan did it. You say it’s hard getting a hold of the ventilators, but Germany managed.’”
5. Proactively engage with your audiences.
Stories can better reflect the whole of a community’s problems and responses if journalists intentionally connect with their audiences (SJN explores this in its engagement toolkit). To that end, and to strengthen The Upside’s COVID-19 coverage, Rice-Oxley “proactively engages” with the readers of the vertical’s weekly newsletter by encouraging them to answer questions like “What are you doing? What are you seeing? What’s it like where you are?”
Rice-Oxley says that asking these “teasing questions,” and giving readers a simple way to reply, has helped The Upside seed several good solutions story tips. Recently, for example, a woman from West London shared a video of a neighbor leading an outdoor Zumba class while “students” joined in from their balconies. “We’ve had some fantastic input on what communities and neighborhoods are doing,” Rice-Oxley says. “Maybe not as a solution to kill the virus, but as a way to help people cope with it.”
6. Seize the moment for solutions journalism — but be strategic with timing.
Readers, journalists, and editors alike are craving solutions coverage now more than ever to complement, what Rice-Oxley calls, “the grimmest story of our lifetime.” The Upside has gone from producing 2–3 solutions journalism stories per week to 2–3 solutions stories per day.
“If editors are having to put such grim stories on their front pages, they’re going to want something optimistic to level the mix, something to show the light at the end of the tunnel,” Rice-Oxley said. “Looking at the reader response and the web traffic, a lot more people understand the purpose of having solutions journalism in the mix.”
Still, Rice-Oxley cautions that freelancers may have a difficult time selling any story right now. For COVID-focused solutions stories, most newsrooms, including The Guardian, have a team of reporters dedicated to pandemic coverage. At The Guardian, that coverage accounts for about 70% of the publication’s content. Which means freelancers will have a hard time finding a COVID-19 story to pitch that’s not already being done in-house. At the same time, The Guardian has a fraction of its typical space for pitches on everything else.
Rice-Oxley advises freelancers to hunker down and consider the long game, preparing strong pitches on the important non-COVID-19 stories newsrooms will be seeking — if not now, then eventually.
“It’s really hard to do, but if I was a smart freelancer looking to land a solutions story in a major newspaper, I wouldn’t be focused on COVID-19,” Rice-Oxley says. “I’d be looking far away from it, unless you’ve got something really unique and original and nobody else has got.”
Stories mentioned in the webinar:
- A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low (The New York Times, USA)
- Italy, Pandemic’s New Epicenter, Has Lessons for the World (The New York Times, USA)
- Coronavirus, perché la Grecia ha così pochi morti e contagi? (Corriere della Sera, IT)
- A simple mask (Respekt, CZ)
- Corona: 3-D-Drucker gegen medizinische Engpässe (NDR, DE)
- Des plates-formes assurent le suivi des malades infectés par le coronavirus à domicile (Le Monde, FR)
- Que font les villes pour protéger les femmes victimes de violences pendant le confinement? (Mediacites, FR)
- Paid to Stay Home: Europe’s Safety Net Could Ease Toll of Coronavirus (The New York Times, USA)
Check out our collections of solutions journalism stories covering European responses:
Browse the comprehensive list of SJN’s COVID-19 resources here.
