How business news spawned a solutions journalism movement

Keith Hammonds

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.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.