https://reasonstobecheerful.world/hooked-on-solutions-journalism
"At the turn of this century,
New York Times reporter Tina Rosenberg had
uncovered a massive scandal but couldn’t convince her editor to publish her
research: The price for HIV medication had soared. Thousands of patients in the
Global South were dying because they could not afford the expensive treatment.
“What people didn’t know was that the Clinton administration was colluding with
the pharma industry to keep the prices artificially inflated,” the Pulitzer
Prize-decorated Rosenberg says. Her editor at the
New York Times Magazine
agreed that the practice was scandalous but still, he was not willing to “print
yet another depressing AIDS story!”
Rosenberg didn’t give up. Instead, she wrote a feature about a country that
defied the pressure, produced the life-saving medication in its own labs and
distributed it for free, effectively halving the death rate: Brazil.
The success of that
New York Times cover story, “Look at Brazil,” was
phenomenal: The US government changed its policy and the life-saving
antiretrovirals became affordable in the global South. “This is exactly the
principle,” Rosenberg said at a conference of the Solutions Journalism Network
in Sundance, Utah, where I first met her: “Instead of just calling out a
problem, we ask: Who does it better?”
Rosenberg suspected that the solutions principle would make sense for other
topics, too. “The idea is too good to keep it to ourselves,” her colleague
David Bornstein agreed, and in 2013, they co-founded the New York-based
Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), which offers training and support for
solutions journalism."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
