There\u2019s a catch-phrase turning up in the media world. It\u2019s \u201cSolutions Journalism.\u201d Media organizations are recognizing it\u2019s not sufficient to report just on problems. Our world is hungry for solutions.<\/p>\n
At YES!<\/a> we applaud this development. As many of you know, we have focused on solutions ever since we began publishing in 1996. It\u2019s great to have company.<\/p>\n Why do we focus on solutions? At our founding, we recognized our world was headed toward a huge transition: Our societies couldn\u2019t keep heating up the atmosphere, expanding material consumption, and concentrating wealth and power. We knew that, without a change of course, we would hit environmental, social, and economic walls.<\/p>\n The question on our minds was: \u201cWhat would such a transition look like?\u201d As YES! co-founder and Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder put it, \u201cWill we turn against each other in a struggle for the last resources or turn to one another in cooperation and community?\u201d<\/p>\n Now, as then, we believe a key to determining that choice is our collective ability to envision a path to a better world. Fortunately, there are plenty of people developing the solutions that make up that path. By telling their stories in YES!, we show that grassroots leaders can be found in communities everywhere, and we invite others to join in becoming agents of change.<\/p>\n One thing you\u2019ll notice about our solutions journalism: We don\u2019t focus on just any solution. For example, you won\u2019t find a story on Wal-Mart going green. Why not? Because any environmental good those changes may do is outweighed, in our judgment, by the flaws that make the Wal-Mart model damaging to our society as a whole.<\/p>\n You also won\u2019t find many stories on technology\u2014it’s an important force but is not by itself a solution. If we suddenly had cheap, carbon-free energy, but didn\u2019t change our culture and institutions, we\u2019d still destroy our Earth. We\u2019d likely build even bigger houses, overfish our oceans even faster, dig even deeper for minerals to make gadgets, and concentrate more wealth in global corporations.<\/p>\n So what are the solutions that we at YES! view as worth communicating? They are solutions that:<\/p>\n We focus on solutions coming from the grassroots because we know significant shifts must come from the people. That\u2019s why you\u2019ll see YES! frequently covering social movements. Those often take the form of protest, such as the folks in Texas protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, and families of prisoners protesting mandatory prison sentences. When those protests move in the direction of real solutions, we report on them as part of the pathway to deep change.<\/p>\n The practical actions we feature fit together to reveal large societal shifts that hold the potential for a better world. Our journalism offers a lens that reveals an emerging world nearly invisible to most of the media.<\/p>\n So you can see, our journalism is about solutions, but not just any solution. It\u2019s about transformational solutions for a turbulent time\u2014solutions we can all help make happen. Our lives quite literally depend on them.<\/p>\n __________________________<\/p>\n Fran Korten wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse<\/b><\/a>, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Fran is publisher of YES!<\/i><\/p>\n\n