The Story Fellowship is a paid, year-long (through end of January 2019) opportunity to join the Solutions Journalism Network in spotlighting high-calibre journalism and engaging communities around solutions-focused and results-oriented news stories. Our Solutions Story Tracker is a distinctive knowledge asset that can provide high value to journalists, citizens, and actors across society. Through analysis, indexing, and curation of solutions journalism stories through this database, our nine 2018 Fellows will be equipping society with the information it needs to tackle today’s most pressing social problems, while acquiring valuable experience in the growing field of the digital humanities.
About SJN and the Solutions Story TrackerTM:
The Solutions Journalism Network is reimagining the news. Our mission is to spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous reporting on responses to social problems. We seek to rebalance the news, so that every day people are exposed to stories that help them understand problems and challenges, and stories that show potential ways to respond.
Our dissemination activities are concerned with accelerating the diffusion of solutions stories into society and, in turn, building demand for more and higher-quality solutions reporting. Over the past three years, the spread of solutions journalism has yielded a growing critical mass of solutions stories. These stories—in text, audio, video, and multimedia—produce immediate value for the people who come across them, and we understand anecdotally that solutions journalism generates different sorts of conversations that can strengthen citizenship. But they also form a distinctive, higher-value asset: a real-time view or “heat map” showing how society is adapting to major social challenges. These stories can help journalists, policymakers, academics, philanthropic institutions, and citizen-sector actors bridge the gaps between what is broadly understood about problems and what is usually not understood about emerging responses to those problems. Our dissemination work seeks to organize the market for solutions journalism by directing available supply to individuals and groups among whom demand is greatest.
In 2016, we launched a curated database of solutions journalism called Solutions Story Tracker, which now contains over 2,400 stories, tagged by issue and problem-solving approach and mapped by the location of the reported effort. We believe the Story Tracker is a distinctive knowledge asset that can provide high value to journalists, citizens, and actors across society.
Your Responsibilities:
-Commitment to 13 months (January through January), 10 hours / week
-Identify high-quality examples of solutions journalism (critical reporting on ideas and approach addressing social problems)
-Read and tag stories based on criteria such as the issue area and success factors (strategic insights that emerge as patterns)
-Be resident expert of solutions journalism stories on a particular issue (e.g. Health, Education, Environment)
-Curate collections of relevant and interesting solutions journalism for various audiences
-Review and oversee the quality of the story database
-Engage with other Fellows through Slack
-Attend two web-based Fellowship Summits (April, Sept)
-Reflect and present your learnings to the SJN team Mentor the next cohort of Fellows
Required and Preferred Qualifications:
-Avid and critical reader by habit
-Attention to detail and strong work ethic
-Ability to succinctly summarize others’ writing
-Interest and knowledge of current events
-Passion for SJN’s mission of using the power for solutions journalism to build a better world
Click Here to Apply:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSchSsOSJGk1LmSFQW_Dc0d3g9EFUenBV1qFSHmtL6DDNMZkmQ/viewform?usp=sf_link.
Solutions Journalism Network is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes candidates from diverse backgrounds.