Saanya Jain of The Idea interviewed Solutions Journalism president Keith Hammonds, a former editor at BusinessWeek and Fast Company.
Here is an excerpt:
Where does your personal interest in solutions journalism come from?
A lot of business journalism turns out to be solutions-focused. If you look at publications like Bloomberg Businessweek or Fortune, a lot of what they write is focused on strategies for success: What are the best ways to market your product? What are the best ways to manage people?
As David Bornstein has said, there is not a company called Fast Bankruptcy that is focused on failure. In a way, that solutions focus is built into the DNA of business reporting. As a business journalist, that skillset came pretty easily.
Also as a matter of orientation, around the time SJN was being formed, I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the relentless focus in news coverage on what was wrong, what’s broken, what’s corrupt, to the exclusion mostly of attempts to correct what’s wrong.
