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Solutions Journalism with David Bornstein

36:30 > https://soundcloud.com/demystifying-media/david-bornstein

SPEAKERS: David Bornstein, Damian Radcliffe,

Damian Radcliffe
Hello, and welcome to the Demystifying Media podcast. I'm Damian Radcliffe, the Carolyn S.
Chambers Professor of Journalism at the University of Oregon, and my guest today is David
Bornstein, co-founder and CEO of the Solutions Journalism Network. David's our first speaker for
spring 2018 in the Demystifying Media series, a program which brings inspiring thinkers from across
the creative industries and academia to the University of Oregon. David, welcome.

David Bornstein
Thank you, Damian.

Damian Radcliffe
So, quick bit of background about our guest: David co-founded, with Courtney Martin and Tina
Rosenberg, the Solutions Journalism Network in 2012. He authors a column for the New York Times
called "Fixes," which examines solutions to social problems and how they work. And he's also the
editor of three books, including How to Change the World, Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of
New Ideas, and The Story of the Grameen Bank, a micro finance company founded in Bangladesh.
David, you're talking tomorrow about solutions journalism and why it matters. I wondered if we could
just start at the beginning, really, and define for our audience what solutions journalism is, and also
what it is not.

David Bornstein
Yeah, sure. It's just a rigorous framework that helps journalists understand how they can report on
responses to social problems, not just the problems, but to do it in a way that is not fluffy. It's not
hero worship, it's not advocacy. And you know, it really matters because the news tends to focus
so much on pathology and dysfunction, and it leaves people feeling unduly hopeless or cynical,
when in fact, there are many people responding to problems and, in some cases, very effectively.

Damian Radcliffe
Why was there a need to create this network and also this approach?

David Bornstein

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It's interesting. When we speak to most journalists, and we talk about that journalism should
incorporate more reporting on how people are responding to problems, most people agree, you
know. And the question is, why doesn't it happen? And it doesn't happen because you do need
a kind of mindset shift and a behavior change in newsrooms to get people away from the habit of
how journalism has been practiced.

At the same time, you do need new sources. So there are adaptations to your process, if you're a
journalist, to do a lot more solutions reporting. Your editors have to think it's a priority, not just
something to have on a Sunday afternoon, occasionally. So for all those reasons, you know, it
really seemed like it needed more than just lip service to get this change to happen. It actually
needed a concerted effort.

Damian Radcliffe
So what was the process by which you came to this conclusion that it needed this concerted effort?
And then you therefore put in place the instrument to make that happen?

David Bornstein
Yeah. So initially, a bunch of journalists came together, and we discussed what should we do. Is
this a good idea? Should journalism take this seriously? Is it important to have a category--
should it be called solutions, journalism, or constructive journalism, or responsive journalism or
whatever? That was the original process. And then we thought very quickly, you know, this is sort
of academic, I mean, we can talk about this, you know, amongst ourselves, let's just see what it
looks like.

And I happened to meet David Boardman who used to be the chair of our board, but he was the
editor of the Seattle Times. This was in 2012, I just had lunch with him. And I said, you know, we're
coming together to do this work. And we would love to start with some projects with news
organizations, just to see what it is. So he liked the idea. He wanted to focus on education--that was
a beat that mattered to the Seattle Times a lot. And he said, "we've covered all the problems to
death in Seattle. But if you ask most people, most of our readers, they couldn't tell you what are the
things that people are trying to do to solve those problems. So this really makes a lot of sense."

Damian Radcliffe
But this does require a philosophical shift for many newsrooms, and for many journalists who have
typically determined what the news agenda is, and how stories should be covered, and had very
particular approaches to certain types of issues. So how have you addressed some of those cultural
change elements?

David Bornstein

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Yeah, so I have to say that we had so many arguments at the beginning, that, you know, journalists
know that their product, the news, depresses people, and makes them feel powerless. This is not a
surprise, it's not news that that's what the news does. I mean, I think that if the news--if the news
were a pill, and all the known effects of the news were given in pill form, the FDA probably wouldn't
approve it.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. But the arguments, you know, when we talked to journalists
about this, they all acknowledged it, but it didn't change people's practice. You know, ultimately, the
one that seems to have had the most impact is if you really care about holding people
accountable, and you think your job, one, is to hold power to account especially, you can't do it
just by criticizing people every day. You have to show that better performance is possible. It's
being done by another city, or another town, or another institution, and you have no excuses.

You can't just sit back there and hide behind your excuses, or blame the families or whoever it is, say
we don't have enough money or any of the excuses that officialdom often use to justify mediocre or
really negligent performance. You show people that better is possible, you make it painful for them
to hold to the status quo, and then you keep the pressure on. And that's a great way to sharpen
accountability.

The solutions journalism becomes part of your core mission. So we're not now adding it on as a sort
of "nice to have" to give people a nice feeling on the weekend or something, but actually connecting
to the core mission of the news organization. That's actually been very helpful.

Damian Radcliffe
Of course journalists are very competitive beasts, so when they see great stories from
somewhere else, it provides inspiration to want to try and top what other people are doing. And I
think that the kind of the power of the case studies that you have is incredibly influential in terms of
shaping journalists' approaches and opinions. But I've also found, through my own research,
particularly here in the Pacific Northwest, but also across the US, an understanding--unspoken and
unprompted understanding--with many editors that we're going to need to do things differently,
that if we're going to change and arrest the slow decline of paying for journalism and for news,
then doing what we have always done...

We can see the path that is projected in front of us; we may need to do some things differently. And
so I found, in my own research, people, unprompted, starting to talk about the role of solutions
journalism, of just needing to do things differently, to represent and play back to communiti es a
different narrative from the one that perhaps we historically have done. And as a result of that, that
might be one of the ways in which we can not only rebuild trust, but also create a product that
people will pay for.

David Bornstein
Yes, yes, I think it's true. And I think, in fairness to journalists, you know, I think journalism is grappling

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not only with the new business model, but with, in some sense, a theory of what journalism really
has to do to help the world improve. And the rate of change today is so much greater than it was,
say, 50 years ago.

In a world that is generally stable, if the institutions are good, then your job is to keep the dark
corners clean, and then things will be pretty good. So finding out the secrets that can harm us is a
really important part of journalism. And so that is really almost a definition of investigative
journalism. But in a world of rapid change, where you need to adapt much more quickly, finding the
secrets that could help you become much more important.

And I think journalism is always in the business of finding stuff out and bringing that to the public.
And the question of why we now need journalism to really help us adapt to far greater rates of
change, and to much greater uncertainty and the approaching of planetary limits for many things,
whether it's global warming, or the food supply, or what have you--adaptation and security and
well-being are very, very closely tied. And so I think it's a way of helping news organizations really
see, in some ways, a far greater role than they've had in the past.

Damian Radcliffe
Of course, this is something you have always had an interest in. I mentioned at the start some of
the examples of some of the books that you have written--you have a long history of writing about
change and new ideas, social entrepreneurship. How does the Solutions Journalism Network and
the work you do in the solutions journalism space fit into that continuum and your general
philosophy on life?

David Bornstein
Yeah. I wrote a book about the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which was the pioneering micro
finance organization; I had covered murder, when I was at New York Newsday, that had a big
impact on me--it was a murder of a grandmother. And I remember thinking just that day that I
wanted to try to tell other kinds of stories as well, not exclusively, and spent a year in Bangladesh,
seeing that the world was quite different than I thought it was--my image of Bangladesh at the
time was of Marines in helicopters, throwing bags of rice to people in a cyclone wearing ripped
saris and lungis, and just waiting for someone to feed them. And then when I got there, I saw that
there was tremendous capacity and competence, and that this organization really had a very
interesting idea. It wasn't a panacea, but it was working. I had that whole experience.

You know, when I started writing about social entrepreneurs, I had that experience again. And I
remember when I would come back to New York, or Montreal, where I was living before I moved to
New York, people had never heard about these things at all.

And when I tried to tell these stories, sell these stories to editors, they were very hard to sell. And
I remember thinking, why don't people talk about, you know, how people are responding to
problems? You know, there's millions of social change organizations that have popped up just in the

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past 30 years.

I mean, it's really quite a remarkable change, the spread of agency around the world. We know it as a
negative story when people use agency to blow things up. But we really don't know it as a story
about when people use agency to construct better things. It's almost a hidden history. And I had
seen that with my own eyes over and over and over again, and then I would come back and look at
the news organizations and think, why don't they have a framework or a language to write about
these stories? What are they afraid of, in some sense? And there is fear, you know.

Damian Radcliffe
Then there's also a concern that the lessons from places like Bangladesh, for example, are not
necessarily applicable to communities in the United States, and to what extent to, therefore,
people care, because that experience seems so far removed from life here.

David Bornstein
Yeah, I think that that's true too. What's really interesting that we have found in just the 150
news organizations we've worked with, mainly in the United States, is that an interesting story
from another town about how they're solving poverty--or you can't really solve poverty, but how
they're reducing poverty--or even another country like Bangladesh can actually be made locally
relevant.

And you know, what's interesting is that a good idea is a good idea, or an interesting teachable
lesson about how did you change the behavior in the hospitals? How did you get the nurses
and the doctors to remember to wash their hands over and over and over again, a problem that
many hospitals have? Well, if you do that in 10 hospitals, the other, you know, 5490 in the United
States, it's interesting to them too! They want to understand that.

So the opportunity to cross pollinate and to learn from other places through the solutions journalism
approach creates a really interesting job description for a local journalist. Suddenly, your job isn't
just to cover Eugene--your job is to cover the world for Eugene and bring back anything that the
community could benefit from hearing about. That's a really exciting job. You need a travel budget,
though.

Damian Radcliffe
They're hard to get in this day and age! There are very many transferable lessons, and if you look at
kind of the issues that say, our city faces around homelessness, education, and a whole bunch of
other topics, they're not unique to the Pacific Northwest. They're not unique to the United States.
There are lessons we can learn from elsewhere.

David Bornstein

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Yes, yes.

Damian Radcliffe
And then I was curious, just as we were kind of touching on this kind of international dimension -
-if people are not familiar with the Solutions Journalism Story Tracker, which is on your website,
they should check it out. And it's a fantastic resource, a great place for inspiration for case studies
from all around the world. Just last night, when I checked on there, there were 3235 stories from
580 news outlets in 134 different countries, which is incredible.

But I was also curious about what you have found from your work in different countries, whether
their approach not just to solutions journalism, but just journalism per se, is different. Is there a very
kind of strong North American-centric perception of this is what journalism is and what it should
not be, or are we seeing those kinds of boundaries breaking down internationally?

David Bornstein
Yeah, actually, there's blurring of the boundaries, even in the United States. But yes, I would say
that, for example--just to give you some different examples--in the UK, I was just, you know,
having conversations at The Guardian last week. I would say that getting solutions journalism
adopted among journalists in England has been hard, particularly hard. I think there's a very
strong, very traditional role that our job is to hold power to account, and that's it.

In Africa, on the other hand, people have been very open to it. And they've always felt that their job
is to provide information to the community to help the community improve. So we've just started
working in Africa, and the resistance is lower. But we really want to
make sure--there's not as much administrative and really high quality data for journalists to go
upon when it comes to vetting ideas, and all that. So there's other challenges.

In India, there's a big pay-to-play problem where news organizations, some of them very large, are
known to take money to write about, you know, this NGO or that NGO. So we have, actually, at this
point decided not to work in India, because it would be sort of catastrophic to the idea to have it be
used as a PR tool for foundations or nonprofits.

And then within the United States, you have a lot of community newspapers around the country that
are still very devoted to the well-being of their town. They are in some cases still owned by the family
that started them perhaps in the 19th century, and they're often willing to go very far in terms of
engagement and really helping the community improve, and in some cases, putting their voice
behind different ideas in a way that public radio stations would never do, because they would feel
that that's going too far.

We're agnostic about the engagement that news organizations do. You know, I think that different
ownership models will probably try to push the needle in different ways, but we really are not

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agnostic about the quality of the reporting. The reporting should be rigorous --it should not say
there's any one way. There's no right solution to a problem. It should have enough evidence to
say this is a good story, but not to overclaim beyond what you c an claim from, you know, if the
teachers say this model is a great model for teaching students with learning disabilities, we find
that it's getting great results, then that's all you can say. And we'll come back a year later and see
if the data, the test results actually seem to bear that out?

Damian Radcliffe
And are you finding certain types of beats or newsrooms, where a solutions approach really lends
itself most effectively? For example, you know, you talked about some of the kind of family-owned,
smaller, more community-orientated newspapers. Is there a different approach in that
environment to one that's owned by a hedge fund?

David Bornstein
Well, a news organization that's owned by a hedge fund can, you know--as long as the owner still
really cares about the community, there are hedge fund people who are good people.

Damian Radcliffe
Yeah, they're not mutually exclusive.

David Bornstein
But I would say that at the local level, it's very strong. You see local news organizations very quickly
get the power of helping, of being a civic actor in the community that is out there to provide
information to help us understand who we are, what we care about, and how our community can
improve. And once they see that solutions journalism, the integration of solutions journalism,
really helps them in all those three things, they're very strong on it, and they see engagement
opportunities. They start seeing opportunities to, you know, build business models that perhaps
can involve membership, you know, in addition to subscriptions, perhaps local sponsorship from
local businesses or community foundations in order to subsidize some of the things that they want
to do that perhaps may not be paid for by the advertising model.

So we started with Education Lab, which was the first Solutions Journalism series, or project.
That's how the network grew: one project at a time, one news organization at a time, one
partnership--learning really by practice. It's all been very, very, very much 'from the ground up' that
it's grown. And I think that that's why it's spread, because whenever people have doubts, and they
say, "Is this advocacy or you trying to, you know, move backwards in journalism in some ways?"
We say, "Just look at the stories that have come out, look at the series: they've won awards, they've
had real social impact, they've held people accountable." So that's been very important to make it
solid from the beginning.

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Damian Radcliffe
You've given some examples of some of the impacts you've seen for solutions journalism within
newsrooms, but also, you've attracted substantial funding and support from different
organizations to support the roll-out of your network and to train journalists to approach stories in
different ways. Do funders and newsrooms want the same thing, or are you having to pitch that
slightly differently?

David Bornstein
Oh, no, no. Funders have interests. And actually, news organizations have interests, too-- they're just
quite different. But where there is an overlap is a good funder, a good foundation is really
interested in a particular social problem, and seeing that problem solved.

For example, with the Seattle Times Education Lab, we had spoken wit h the Knight
Foundation--their mission is really to support journalism and to see journalism succeed in
America, it's very broad--and the Gates Foundation, whose mission in the United States is to
improve public education. So we basically put together a project around what works to improve
the public schools in Seattle.

David Bornstein
Initially, the editors were worried, as they are with any funding, that they don't want the tail
wagging the dog. They don't want to be told what to cover, they don't want to have to worry that if
they say something or write something that the funder is not happy about, or if their own grantees
don't get covered that the funding will dry up. They certainly don't want the funders to coerce
them into covering topics from a particular angle. So these were all right on the table right at the
beginning: no editorial control, full editorial independence for the paper.

In fact, when that series started, because the Seattle Times editorially had had a particular position
on education, there were a lot of people in Seattle who were very concerned about this, and they
were ready to jump all over this with massive criticism if they felt that the independence of the
paper was being affected by this. So it was very important in the first year of the project that the
reporting was very high quality and did not, you know, have any appearance and any reality of
being coerced, and really that's why that project succeeded. They've won one APME Media
Mediators award for the engagement that they've done but really are widely recognized as a very
good series.

Damian Radcliffe
And what about the impact on communities and audiences? Do they respond to these types of
stories in different ways? Is there a role for solutions journalism to change perception of the
media and of journalism, or indeed their own view of their own community itself?

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David Bornstein
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Audiences respond positively. I mean, we've heard across the board-- there's
been some research that's been done as well, by the Engaging News Project--these stories get more
time on page when it's measured. Sometimes they get more shares; they never get less. But in
general, what we find from audiences, what they tell their news organizations, and what they've
told us is that they feel a greater sense of efficacy reading stories. It's nice to know that when
there are problems in our communities, there are things that can be done about it. Even if those
things aren't being done in our community, it's nice to know that there's ideas that we could
source from around the country, or even in other countries.

But also, the issue of trust has come up over and over again. You know, there's the sense in
journalism, that trust is merely a function of accuracy. If we just show and substantiate our facts,
then the public will trust us. And what comes back over and over is that trust -- people actually
say, "I don't trust you only because I think you're right, I trust you because I think you have my back."
And you know this old adage: "I don't care what you know, until I know that you care." And so news
organizations in order to win back the trust of their communities --and these are communities,
many often that are split right down the middle politically--it's very important for them to show
through their journalism that they care about the well-being of the community.

It's hard to do that if every time you report on a particular community, you're only doing it because
there's been a shooting or there has been a crime. It's very hard to show that you care if you
practice journalism only around diagnosing and watch-dogging problems. It's an important part of
journalism, but if that's mostly what you do, the community is not going to feel that you really
care. So the integration of solutions journalism is actually a very good way to signal and to show
people we're doing research to try to figure out what's happening out there that could really help
our community and what news organizations have heard from the public is appreciation.

At the national or international level, it's much harder. I mean, it's very difficult to cover the
Syrian civil war from a solutions perspective. But a news organization like Syria Deeply, which is
actually much more on the ground, did want to do solutions journalism, focusing on the civil war.
And when we said, "What are the solution stories?", they said, "Well, on the ground, you have
people even in the midst of a civil war, figuring out how to keep the water running, or how to keep
the water clean, or how to educate girls and how to keep the economy moving, how do we feed
ourselves, all of these things still have to happen." And so there's micro solutions all over Syria,
even as the geopolitical story is still one of the world not really doing what it needs to do to stop
the war. So the larger geopolitical or the larger political stories are often harder to cover from this
lens. The local stories often really lend themselves to learning from others around you.

Damian Radcliffe
But also those perspectives like the ones you've just described, from Syria, ones we don't tend to
hear, they're actually incredibly important inspirational stories in many cases. We do need a kind

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of richer understanding of some of the complexities of the world around us.

David Bornstein
Yeah, you're 100% right. And I think one of the worst things you can do is to cover people always
as victims. Whether it's climate refugees in Alaska, or political refugees, or poor people--
journalism's theory of change is almost that if people know what's wrong, and if they're outraged
enough about what's wrong, the stuff will get fixed. And actually part of completing that theory of
change is "and if they also know how things are getting fixed, maybe the stuff will get fixed."

But one of the things that you can do when you cover people as victims is, it actually is harder to
care about people and to empathize people when you don't think that they're like you. And people
don't like to think of themselves as victims.

So it's really actually hard to connect at that you know, mirror -neuron level with people who are so
otherized through the news. So showing Syrians competently solving their own problems on the
ground, even at a micro level, I think a lot of journalists fear that if you
write that story, you're going to make people complacent. You're going to make them think we
should--

Damian Radcliffe
It will sort itself out.

David Bornstein
Yeah, you know, we don't have to be as vigilant anymore. But writing a solutions story doesn't let
people off the hook. But it does show that these people are competent actors, that they're, just like I
found in Bangladesh, these people actually are a lot smarter and competent than they are portrayed
and it actually makes you care more about them. So I think that's money that journalism is leaving on
the table right now.

Damian Radcliffe
And also for communities closer to home, there's an important role in reflecting back the lives and
interests of communities that in many cases they will feel just is not currently reflected in current
coverage.

David Bornstein
Yeah, for sure. We hear that all the time. You know, "do you trust the news?" I write for the New York
Times. "Do you trust the New York Times?" "Well, yeah, I think it's accurate. But whenever you come
to cover us"--we heard this in Alabama--"you cover us like we're a bunch of ignorant yokels."

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I think people are very sensitive about the way that they're depicted in the news. And particularly in
today's polarized environment, people just think that, you know, they're, they're going to be made to
look foolish if they have a particular political perspective in one place or another.

Damian Radcliffe
And does that mean then that sources are perhaps more amenable to engaging with the media and
participating in interviews and so forth if they know that the approach is going to be perhaps more
balanced than perhaps they perceived it to be in the past?

David Bornstein
I mean, it depends on the source. If your source is a lobbyist in Washington, their goal
might not be to see the problem solved. I shouldn't put down all lobbyists, but some lobbyists. But if
your source is somebody working, you know, to try to solve a problem, and if they're basically a
good faith actor in that process, which I would say is most people, then for them to know that you're
interested in how are you trying to get this problem solved?

You're not interested in just writing a story about how the graduation rate has not gone up, you're
actually interested in what's their process, you're curious about what they're trying to do, and you're
going to report on it in a fair way, if they get a good result. And you're going to say they got a good
result. If they don't get a good result, you're going to say, 'they tried, and they did this for six
months, and nothing changed, and, you know, what are you going to do next?' And you'll give them
a say: "well, we realize our assumptions were wrong, it didn't work. And, you know, next year we're
shifting," which is pretty much the truth.

So once sources realize you're actually interested in covering them and interested in their process,
they share information more readily. You get better journalism. There's all these insights in failure
anyways; even if the thing didn't work, you're going to learn something from why it didn't work.
Usually things don't [not] work because people are incompetent. Usually things don't work because
it's hard to change things. It's really hard to solve problems and things don't work because you
didn't understand, you know, how to make it work. You know, it's like Thomas Edison said, "I didn't
fail. I just found 5000 ways that won't work."

Damian Radcliffe
When I spoke to one of your colleagues, Keith Hammonds, as part of one of my research projects,
he said that actually, you found anecdotally that journalists, they enjoy writing these types of
stories. They can be a very cynical bunch, but actually, they find it fulfilling to be able to just show a
more complex, more nuanced, slightly less black-and-white view of the world that they are
reporting on.

David Bornstein

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Yes, that's right. So you know, Journalism 101: your editor says to you, when you write your first story,
"Where's the conflict?" And you think, "Oh, there has to be a conflict in the story. So I guess I will get
someone to say something on the other side." We saw that, you know, in an absurd way around
global warming, where there would be somebody--you know, we don't do this anymore--but there
would be somebody from, I don't know, the American Enterprise Institute to say that the research
was not good or something.

Damian Radcliffe
The fallacy of equivalency.

David Bornstein
Right. But the conflict doesn't have to be this sort of binary -argument, almost second- grade
conflict. The conflict in a solution story is how hard it is to solve a problem. It's the world as it is and
the world as we want it to be, and just how hard it is to make it happen that way, how hard it is to get
rid of the achievement gap in the United States. So there's conflict.

But if you think like, where does that conflict exist in literature, that's pretty much the conflict of
engineers building things. It's the conflict of detectives trying to solve cases. How do you figure
out this problem? How do you crack the case? It's Sherlock Holmes. And a lot of these stories, we
started calling them, a couple years ago, "how-done-its" instead of whodunits, because what drives
the narrative is curiosity. How are they actually going to get the school dropout rate to go down?
Or how are they going to get the graduation rate to go up? And they've tried to do all these things.
Will it work? Well, tune in after the commercial break, and we'll let you know how this experiment
went.

The narratives, instead of driving them by worthiness--"you should read this because it's important
and you're supposed to care about the world"--you can really actually run them through curiosity,
and a genuine interest in understanding how this sort of experiment is going to play out over time.

And oftentimes, social change takes a long time. So it's not like you're going to know the answer
at the end of the story. And it's a great opportunity to say, "You know what, we're going to come
back to this in six months, or three months, when we know some more," and you can create that
trust and sort of narrative continuity with your audience to show them that this isn't just a fly-by-
night operation, you're going to be around.

Damian Radcliffe
Taking that longitudinal approach is something I know you talked about in a recent New York Times
column, when you interviewed Steven Pinker about his book, Enlightenment Now. I thought that was
really insightful in terms of just again reiterating that we need to
change the traditional journalistic paradigm to both produce better stories, but also to show to
audiences a more complex reality of the world around them.

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David Bornstein
Yeah. Yeah. You know, Pinker's work is so interesting because the data that he has in that book, the
kinds of changes he's able to show over the last--it's not his data, he's taking it from other data
aggregators--that poverty has gone down globally. Most people don't believe that. Hans Rosling,
who passed away recently and used to run Gapminder, was able to show in surveys that most
people think that poverty is increasing around the world.

Most people think that problems are increasing. Some are, but when it comes to poverty, when it
comes to longevity, when it comes to literacy around the world, when it comes to what Pinker
called "healthy, wealthy and wise," the trends are actually very, very good globally. Now, he's also
able to show that in the United States, some of those trends have stagnated too.

Damian Radcliffe
Like the happiness index.

David Bornstein
The happiness index--you know, David Brooks wrote a column yesterday in the Times talking
about depression and anxiety and things like loneliness, and, of course, income and wealth
inequality. Wealth inequality is getting worse.

But we can talk about the problems in a way that I think engages the public more deeply if we're
also able to show that we have made a lot of progress in some areas, and we've stagnated and
gone backwards in other areas. That creates a nuanced sense of things that actually makes it
easier for people to engage with topics, you know, and not, as more than a third of Americans do
now, avoid the news because it's just too much to take.

Damian Radcliffe
You also touched on the fact that change takes time. You're now six years in since you launched the
Network. Just wanted to conclude by asking you where you go next. What's on the agenda for you?

David Bornstein
So we're hoping to double the number of news organizations that we will have worked with by
2020, and to work with tens of thousands more journalists through the network that we have. We
have a lot of tools on the website--soon to be in seven languages--to help journalists get a sense
of what this is, working with more journalism schools. We're hoping that the Pulitzer Prizes
creates a category in solutions journalism. We've just started working in Africa, as I mentioned,
and in Europe.

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But basically, you know, our goal is ultimately to put ourselves out of business. The Solutions
Journalism Network does not have to live forever. It's really helping to get journalism to integrate this
into the news so that eventually, the category of solutions journalism, you know, doesn't have to
really exist.

Damian Radcliffe
It just becomes journalism.

David Bornstein
It just becomes journalism, yeah.

Damian Radcliffe
That sounds like an optimistic note on which to end. My thanks to my guest today, David Bornstein.
A reminder that you'll be able to catch David's full talk and other materials related to his presentation
and his visit to the University of Oregon on our website, demystifying.oregon.edu. In the meantime,
thanks once again for joining me today, David.

David Bornstein
Well, thank you, Damian. It was a pleasure.

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