Giving Compass' Take:

• Brent Walth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, who is now a professor at the University of Oregon, teaches students about how solutions journalism enhances investigative journalism. 

• How can funders spread awareness and potentially help to grow the capacity of media outlets implementing solutions journalism approaches?

• Read about the best of solutions journalism stories last year. 

If someone asked you to define solutions journalism, chances are “data,” “investigative” and “evidence” might not come to mind. Yet they top the list when Brent Walth teaches it.

Walth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, first learned about solutions journalism in 2015, when he joined the faculty at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication after more than 30 years as an editor and reporter.

“I was skeptical,” Walth said. “After so many years as an investigative reporter, I wasn’t sure what it was. I wasn’t sure I liked what it sounded like. I was worried that it was more advocacy.”

What Walth discovered, however, was an approach that can enrich investigative reporting and create a greater sense of accountability. Now, he teaches an investigative solutions journalism course, one of a battery of offerings available to University of Oregon students via The Catalyst Project, a teaching and research initiative funded in part by the Solutions Journalism Network.

“It’s one thing for watchdog investigative reporters to point out problems, but too often the stories stop right there,” Walth said. “Solutions stories do a really good job of describing problems and then move forward.

“We teach this as this continuous idea of discovering problems, identifying them, and then, what’s essential to solutions journalism, is to find evidence-based responses to problems that either the reporter has discovered, or that a community clearly sees.”

Read the full article about teaching solutions journalism by Sara Catania at The Whole Story.