Constructive Journalism as Practice—Storytelling in Solutions-Focused News Reporting in Mainstream News Media

Constructive or solutions-focused news is often promoted as a way to mitigate news avoidance and declining levels of trust in mainstream news media. The constitutive element of the constructive approach is the prioritization of solutions-focused news stories. Rather than reporting negative, conflict-driven news about societal issues, journalism should focus more on presenting concrete solutions to problems. This study examines how solutions-focused journalism is applied and enacted in mainstream news media in Sweden. By drawing from research on news discourse and news as narrative, we examine journalism as a storytelling practice, analyzing both the “story”—what is told about solutions to problems – and the “telling”—how is it told, i.e., the forms of expression used by journalists. The aim is to analyze how solutions-focused news stories are constructed in journalistic news discourse through a repertoire of storytelling devices. This study presents a qualitative analysis of a corpus of 218 solutions-focused news stories sampled from press, radio, TV, and online news in Sweden. The results describe the prevalence and characteristics of solutions-focused news, identifying the three main formulas for solutions-focused storytelling in mainstream news media. We also outline the potential challenges the solutions-focused approach presents to professional news journalism.