“Like Peanut Butter and Jelly”: Engagement and solutions journalism are better together, says the professor deepening community connections by combining the two
If you had your own personal journalist, what would you have them cover?
That’s a typical question that Nichole Currie puts to the residents of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. Currie is a community reporter for Germantown Info Hub, a pioneering blend of hyper-local news outlet, community convener and sounding board.
Currie spends much of her working hours “tabling,” meaning setting up an actual table outside of a Germantown market or at community gatherings and talking with anyone who walks over.
“We just go out there,” Currie said. “This is the time for those one-on-one connections with people. For me as a reporter it’s very beneficial. I’m not just going to go up to someone saying ‘hey can I interview you?’ I’m making my face familiar in the community.
Sometimes, Currie said, people just want someone to talk to, and they tell her about their day. The more time she spends in the community, she said, the more familiar faces she sees.
“Trust, especially in a neighborhood like Germantown, comes with being persistent,” she said. “It strengthens the trust in the community, really connecting with them. Journalists in the traditional setting don’t get to do that.”
Often the conversation ends with the resident signing up for the Hub’s messaging service — reporters use GroundSource to send out a weekly text, sharing a story of their own or one from a media partner, highlights from community events or asking a question, like the one about having your own personal journalist (the answers frequently include a plea to stop focusing on the negative).
“I think of solutions journalism and engaged journalism as the peanut butter and jelly of journalism. You can have them separately, but they’re so much better together.”
Currie also collects names for a community resource list — community members willing to talk with the media and offer a more nuanced view than the litany of burglaries, car chases and injuries that typically attach to the Germantown name.
The Info Hub emerged from a research project led by Andrea Wenzel, a journalism professor at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, whose work focuses on initiatives to create more connected and inclusive communities through engaged journalism and solutions journalism.
“I think of solutions journalism and engaged journalism as the peanut butter and jelly of journalism,” she said. “You can have them separately, but they’re so much better together.”
The Info Hub’s deceptively simple purpose, as described on their Medium page, is “a public resource to share information and stories of and for residents of the Germantown neighborhood.”
But to achieve that aim, as Wenzel envisions it, requires a willingness to challenge conventional approaches to journalism, a challenge she encourages.
“We asked community members, how do you see your relationship with local news, and how would you like it to be stronger?” and brought together community members and local journalists to hammer out what it would take to “strengthen the local communication infrastructure.” What emerged was the Germantown Info Hub.
“This makes it a little unusual,” Wenzel said. “A process that came out of a research study, a participatory design process, us coming up with it, involving community members along the way.”
The Info Hub regularly convenes monthly solutions-oriented community discussions to air views on divisive subjects like gun violence, gentrification and trash collection, and seeks input from a seven-member community advisory board.
Once the piece is published, the reporter is invited to speak directly to the community and answer their questions in what Wenzel calls “accountability conversations.”
When story ideas bubble up from community conversations, Currie or one of Wenzel’s journalism students might write a story. Sometimes the stories are passed along to a media partner, such as WHYY, Resolve Philly and Billy Penn.
What happens next is both highly unusual for a news outlet and central to the Germantown Info Hub mission. Once the piece is published, the reporter is invited to speak directly to the community and answer their questions in what Wenzel calls “accountability conversations.”
In a neighborhood frequently painted by the media in negative terms, this accountability element was central in the discussions from which the Hub emerged, Wenzel said.
“It’s been an opportunity for very candid feedback,” she said. “People have difficult conversations. That’s been very, very good.”
Some journalists balk at being made answerable to community members — their accountability is to the truth, the reporters say. But, Wenzel and Currie argue, reporting on Germantown has been so skewed to the negative that it’s created a distorted picture of the community, and it is incumbent upon journalists, as perpetuators of the problem, to participate in the repair.
In this context, solutions journalism reporting is essential, said Currie, who first learned of the approach as a graduate student in one of Wenzel’s classes.
“It’s my duty to perform some sort of solutions journalism. It’s what they’re interested in, without them even knowing it’s called solutions journalism. I feel like it has to be in there.”
“The Germantown Hub can’t work without solutions journalism,” Currie said. “When I think about interacting with the community, making those one-on-one connections, they don’t want us to always focus on the problem. They are very adamant about not always focusing on the bad things.
“It’s my duty to perform some sort of solutions journalism. It’s what they’re interested in, without them even knowing it’s called solutions journalism. I feel like it has to be in there.”
The Hub has two main goals, according to Wenzel: bringing together the many active and involved but disconnected residents in the Germantown community, and changing the stigmatizing narratives being told about the neighborhood externally.
A course Wenzel co-teaches at Temple with Marc Lamont Hill includes some solutions journalism reporting, and they convene some sessions of the class in Germantown, a living, breathing classroom in which to deepen their understanding of the approach.
The last time they offered the course, they partnered students with Germantown community members, for a mutual learning opportunity. Germantown Hub also collaborates with Thomas Jefferson University — last spring students in a class taught by class led by Letrell Crittenden were also on the ground connecting with community members and reporting.
“I really like that it addresses some of the concerns of sending students out to report without a lot of background on a neighborhood,” Wenzel said. “They’re working with people who have that local context.”
When asked if the Germantown Info Hub could serve as a model for other communities, Wenzel says yes — to a degree.
“I like to talk about a process being portable but not scalable,” she said. “You could do a similar process, asking your community, ‘what are your concerns, what could be different, how would you like it to look?’ You have to design the project based on the community’s needs. In each place the shape it takes can be a little different.”
Sara Catania is Director of Journalism School Partnerships for the Solutions Journalism Network and teaches journalism at USC Annenberg. This story is one in a series of interviews with journalism educators focusing on how they’re incorporating solutions journalism into their teaching. You can find the entire series here.
Join the Solutions Journalism Hub (it’s free!) for access to a trove of online resources for teaching solutions journalism, including the Curriculum Builder and the Solutions Story Tracker — a searchable database of more than 7,500 vetted solutions journalism stories from across the U.S. and around the world.
