Negative news drive people away
Earlier this year in June, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University in the UK published its annual Digital News Report. One is the key findings is that an increasing number of people actively avoid the news, 32% globally — because the news is too negative. “This may be because the world has become a more depressing place or because the media coverage tends to be relentlessly negative — or a mix of the two,” the Reuters Digital News Report writes.
Just before the study was released, I had handed in my master’s thesis at the University of Amsterdam, after having studied journalism, media science and international relations for the past two years in Denmark and the Netherlands. In class, we talked about what makes a story newsworthy. One of the news values we discussed was negativity: Corruption, conflicts, and crises frequently make headlines. Negative news indeed raises people’s interests — at the same time, it’s also what drives them away.
Solutions journalism: reshifting the focus
Solutions journalism sets a different tone than traditional problem-centric journalism. Instead of only covering what’s broken, journalists are encouraged to do “rigorous reporting about solutions to social problems.”
For my thesis, I wanted to find out how solutions journalism is perceived by the audience.
What do we know about solutions journalism so far?
Right now, there are 7,000+ solutions stories produced by almost 1,000 news outlets in the Solutions Story Tracker®. There are case studies from newsrooms and anecdotal evidence on the positive impact of solutions journalism. The number of empirical studies is still limited, yet growing. (Kyser Lough provides a great bibliography that is frequently updated and there is a “research” tab on the SJN blog.). I chose to build my thesis upon existing work to increase the number of research studies that measure the impact of solutions journalism.
Experiment: solutions story vs. problem story
For the experiment, participants either read a story that only focused on a problem or a solutions story on the same issue. Both the solutions and the problem-centric stories reported on the issue of students being chronically absent from school due to the lack of clean clothes. While the problem-centric story only covered the issue of chronic absenteeism, the solutions story reported on it through the lens of a response. In this case, the response was to introduce washing machines on school grounds.
The framework of the experiment was modeled after previous studies on solutions journalism. In addition, some participants received a solutions story that also included a visualization. Thus, I had seven different story versions that were randomly assigned to the participants. The visualization highlighted the effectiveness of the response, which, in this case, was the school attendance before and after the introduction of the washing machine. I wanted to explore whether data visualizations would have an extra effect on how readers perceive the solutions story because data journalism becomes increasingly important in newsrooms. I tested five visualizations that highlighted the data in a table, a bar chart, a doughnut chart, a pictorial chart, and an infographic.
After reading one of the stories, participants received a questionnaire. The aim of the questionnaire was to gauge their perception of solutions journalism in comparison to “traditional” problem-centric journalism and to find out whether the additional visualization would impact this perception. I defined a set of opinions and characteristics as “perception” in the form of questions asking for the emotional state of participants after having read the story, their attitudes toward the story, how participants evaluated the journalistic standards of the story, the attitudes participants held toward the solution, their self-declared knowledge increase, possible behaviors, how well they recalled the story, and their attitudes toward the visualization.
In total, I tested seven different stories (non-solutions story, solutions story and solutions story plus one the five visualizations) and isolated the impact they had on the audience through statistical analyses in SPSS.
700 Americans participated in that survey. Here's what I found:
- Readers of any of the solutions stories (with and without a visualization) felt better than those who read the problem-centric story. Better means that they indicated more positive affect like empathy, encouragement, and hope.
- Readers of the solutions stories had more positive attitudes toward the story when asked questions such as whether the story seemed useful, appealing, and relevant.
- Readers of the solutions stories had more positive attitudes toward the response, i.e. washing machines in schools, when asked questions like whether or not the response was needed, effective, and favorable. It is important to note that readers of both the solutions stories and the problem-centric story were asked what they thought about the response to the problem, but only readers of the solutions story had details of the implementation and effectiveness of the response in their story.
- Readers of the solutions stories said that they felt they gained more knowledge and were better informed in comparison to the readers of the problem-centric story.
- I did not find any significant differences between readers of the solutions story and the problem-centric story in terms of memorability of the story, self-efficacy, and behavior.
- Solutions stories with an additional visualization neither got better nor worse results than the solutions story with just plain text.
- There was no difference in how the readers evaluated the adherence to journalistic core principles, such as truth and accuracy, independence, fairness, impartiality, and humanity. The evaluation of journalistic core principles in relation to solutions journalism has not been tested in any previous studies.
- This was also the first study to actively test whether demographic factors have an impact on the evaluation of solutions journalism. There was no difference in how men and women rated the story and evaluated their adherence to journalistic standards.
- Same goes for party identification: There was no difference in how Republicans, Democrats or independents rated the story evaluated their adherence to journalistic standards.
Findings that participants who read a solutions story felt better, had more positive attitudes toward the story and the response and gained more knowledge are in line with the results of previous research. The study further corroborates that solutions journalism impacts news consumers more positively than traditional problem-centric journalism.
The more positive attitudes toward the solution indicate that people evaluate a response better when details of its implementation and data on its effectiveness are presented, which might be a valuable consideration for social change.
This early demographic analysis indicates that solutions journalism attracts people equally across genders and party identification, and is thus seemingly valuable to the population as a whole.
Also, for the first time in an empirical study, the journalistic core principles of a solutions story have been evaluated by news consumers. The readers indicated that the solutions story adhered to journalistic core principles just as much as the problem-centric story. Therefore, following the perception of the readers, journalists should not consider solutions journalism being any less legitimate.
Even though the use of data visualizations has become increasingly more popular in journalism, the charts and tables tested in this study did not have any additional effects. Yet it must be noted that only four data points were visualized; results might look different for more complex data.
Finally, looking at the overall impact of solutions journalism news consumers, the results of the study indicate that solutions journalism could be an effective tool to counter the negativity that drives the audience away from the news.