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Most of us think of solutions journalism as long-form written articles. There is a lot of ground to cover after all, from identifying the problem to highlighting the solution, assessing its limits and measuring its success.
The Solutions Journalism Network has the most authoritative collection of such stories on its Solutions Story Tracker. Of the 10,000 stories there, less than 300 are from broadcast TV news.
One of the reasons for this could be that local TV news usually means short, single-topic bulletins. At KXAN, a Texas-based TV station owned by the largest local TV company in the US, Nexstar Media Group, a typical news bulletin is one minute and 15 seconds.
This month, KXAN launched the 'Pandemic: PASS or FAIL' project; a collaborative, company-wide, solutions-focused investigation into education inequality during the coronavirus pandemic. The main problem: trying to package a typically lengthy style of journalism into a traditionally concise medium.
In this week's podcast, Josh Hinkle, director of investigations and innovations at KXAN, talks about the project and explains how to integrate the solutions journalism style into local TV news.
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