Reflections on being part of the Solutions Story Tracker®
NOTE: The Solutions Specialist application form is now closed. Please check the SJN website for other job opportunities!
Here at Solutions Journalism Network, we are looking for voracious readers and bright, curious learners to join our Solutions Story Tracker® database team!
The new Solutions Specialist roles are an exciting expansion of our work to review, tag, and curate solutions journalism for journalists, citizens, and actors across society.
Would you like to join the team? If so, you can find the job description and application form here. But first, take a peek into what it’s like to work on the database from a few of our former fellows! (Huge shout-out to our friends at Hearken for inspiring us to compile this post!)
Areeba Haider
Public Policy Researcher in Washington, D.C.
Areeba managed the socio-economic mobility beat as a 2019 Senior Story Fellow and the human services beat as a 2018 Story Fellow.
I came to work for Solutions Journalism Network because it was a great way to stay up to date on the work being done to fix the social issues I read about for my day job in the policy world.
The best part of working with solutions stories is constantly learning about something new!
Just one of my favorite stories of the year is “Can Community Investment Trusts Help Slow Down Gentrification?” by Brendan Seibel for Pacific Standard. The story takes on a topic I’m personally very interested in — gentrification — and explores a solution that is working to promote building assets and community ownership. I love stories that manage to explain the important details while still giving a reader enough context to understand the bigger picture. With Pacific Standard shutting down earlier this year, it’s also a reminder of the importance of supporting good journalism.
Only-at-SJN: As a fellow, I was able to work on a team project for social entrepreneurship organization Ashoka. The collaboration and analysis taught me a lot about “changemakers” across the country and was a new way to analyze the solutions stories I’ve read.
Megan Kamerick
Radio Host and Public TV Correspondent in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Megan managed the public safety beat as a 2018 Story Fellow.
I came to work for Solutions Journalism Network because I believe deeply in the concept of solutions journalism. It really is a robust way of doing journalism by exploring how people are responding to problems and evaluating how well those responses work. It’s truly telling the whole story.
The best part of working with solutions stories: It’s so inspiring to see how people are responding to problems around the world. I found it a great antidote to feeling hopeless about the future of our planet. It also inspired my own journalism work.
My favorite solutions stories: …It is REALLY difficult to choose because I read so many amazing stories! But I will choose the two episodes of the Reply All podcast I added that focused on the creation of CompStat. The first episode offered this amazing narrative of this tool that seemed like magic because it used data to go after every crime in NYC. It seemed to create an amazing drop in crime. But the second episode looked at the human factors that distorted this system and resulted in more racial profiling. It was fascinating — and also a strong cautionary tale about looking for a silver bullet to problems.
Only-at-SJN: It was great to share the expertise that I gained from reading so many stories and making them into collections with the SJN staff. I realized that much of this information I shared about women and incarceration was unknown to them and that was very rewarding to share this data and hear how excited they were to learn about.
Mike Yates
Visual Artist and Co-founder of WAYO-LP in Rochester, New York
Mike managed the arts, culture, and social sciences beat as a 2018 Story Fellow.
I came to work for Solutions Journalism Network to have the opportunity to work with interesting people on an important project focused on the topics that have obsessed me my adult life.
The best part of working with solutions stories: Diving deep into the work being done in a particular field, on a particular topic has the cumulative impact of expanding the idea of what is possible and pushing back against the feeling of helplessness it is so easy to feel in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.
My favorite stories I worked on were focused on labor organizing in the arts and journalism, more traditional organizing like unionizing efforts in digital media, and innovative efforts like the Working Artists and the Greater Economy.
Only-at-SJN: To read about the solutions being tried out to address an issue — in this case the use of “intimacy advisors” to work with actors in theatrical productions — and then see the implementation of this solution in my own community and see a front page article on it in our free weekly over a year later.
[The Solutions Specialist application form is now closed. Please check the SJN website for other job opportunities!] Would you like to join our database team? Click here to learn more and apply! Deadline is Thursday, Feb. 6 at 5pm EST.
