Giving Compass' Take:

• Edie Rubinowitz teaches solutions journalism as a beginner course at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago to her "non-traditional" students, some of whom have lived experience with the issues they're covering.

• How can donors support this rigorous reporting in newsrooms that have limited staff? What can be done to ensure that marginalized communities are represented in journalism, especially solutions journalism? 

• Read about the best solutions journalism of 2018.

The students who walk into Edie Rubinowitz’s journalism classroom at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago don’t have much time to lay a groundwork. These are “non-traditional” students, with jobs, kids, commutes.

They’ve found their way to Rubinowitz’s classroom, sure, but they’re not necessarily committed to a journalism career. That’s a rough path even in good times, and these days much more so, with no guarantee of a job down the line.

So in the fall of 2017, Rubinowitz tested something different: a one-semester course that kicked off with a quick, three-week primer in the basics of journalism and then pivoted. The rest of the course was focused on the process of reporting a single story grounded in solutions journalism — rigorous reporting on responses to social problems. Her students dug into the work with great enthusiasm, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

This may be the only journalism course her students take, and she wants to make it worth their while. “What I see is a deep passion for some of these issues,” at the heart of the solutions journalism approach, often from personal experience, she said. “If you want to look at poverty and near-homelessness, I have students who’ve have been homeless or near homeless. If you want to look at violence we have students who are affected by violence.”

“The beauty of solutions journalism is that it is a way to begin to expand coverage of these communities, to look at them in a complex, holistic way. Both the things that may not be working well, but definitely the things that are assets.”

Read the full article about solutions journalism by Sara Catania at Medium.