How to get more people to read about a depressing news topic? Give it a positive spin, as one digital newspaper in Ohio did.
Reporter Brittany Schock wrote a three-part series on the high infant mortality rate in Richland County, Ohio, for the Richland Source in Mansfield, but some in the community said it was too depressing to read. "The Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit that advocates for rigorous reporting on responses to social problems, wanted to tap into that disconnect between readers and Schock’s reporting," April Simpson reports for Current. "It approached her with the promise of $10,000 in grant funding to divide between continuing her reporting and developing a community-engagement project."
So Schock and her editors spent five months planning a baby shower for the community to celebrate healthy babies and moms, combining the grant with $7,000 in local sponsorship raised by the paper's sales team. Schock wrote stories promoting the shower, got about 20 community organizations to participate and offer goodie bags and prizes, shot a video highlighting the shower's goals, and talked about it on local radio. The shower, held Sept. 9, 2017, was a hit: it drew 500 people, "with a line stretching around the corner before the doors opened," Simpson reports.
At the shower, the paper asked moms about the rewards and challenges of motherhood and turned the recorded responses into a multimedia project called "Faces of Motherhood".
The event did more than raise awareness: as solutions journalism seeks to do, it brought some promising results. "A local pediatrician said they received 99 new referrals in one day from the event. A local organization of community health workers contacted multiple new clients," Simpson reports. The shower's success and the Richland Source's reputation for organizing it helped them raise $70,000 in donations from local businesses and organizations for other solutions journalism and community events.
The paper and community are planning another shower for September 2019.
Reporter Brittany Schock wrote a three-part series on the high infant mortality rate in Richland County, Ohio, for the Richland Source in Mansfield, but some in the community said it was too depressing to read. "The Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit that advocates for rigorous reporting on responses to social problems, wanted to tap into that disconnect between readers and Schock’s reporting," April Simpson reports for Current. "It approached her with the promise of $10,000 in grant funding to divide between continuing her reporting and developing a community-engagement project."
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| Richland County (Wikipedia map) |
At the shower, the paper asked moms about the rewards and challenges of motherhood and turned the recorded responses into a multimedia project called "Faces of Motherhood".
The event did more than raise awareness: as solutions journalism seeks to do, it brought some promising results. "A local pediatrician said they received 99 new referrals in one day from the event. A local organization of community health workers contacted multiple new clients," Simpson reports. The shower's success and the Richland Source's reputation for organizing it helped them raise $70,000 in donations from local businesses and organizations for other solutions journalism and community events.
The paper and community are planning another shower for September 2019.
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