Solutions Journalism Network wants to change journalism, offers up to $5,000 in expenses for climate change stories.

The Solutions Journalism Network is tired of stories that tell us what's wrong without telling us what might be done about it.

It says its aim is to recognize and support "critical and clear-eyed reporting that investigates and explains credible responses to social problems," according to its website. "The key is to look at the whole picture, the problem and the response (journalism often stops short of the latter)."

And as one of its first projects, it has set up a fund to support stories on climate change with grants of up to $5,000 to cover expenses. The awards will also include "mentorship from leading journalists" and "access to story-sourcing tools," whatever those might be. (If you're interested, applications are due by May 20th.) The group will also help recipients to place and publicize their work "through our network, website, and partnerships." And journalists will be asked to follow up after publication "on what, if any, known outcomes followed from publication." The site says that the noted environment reporter and New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew C. Revkin will help judge applications for the funds.

The organization was set up by David Borenstein, an entrepreneur, author, and co-author of the FIXES column on the opinion pages of The New York Times; Courtney E. Martin, an author, blogger, and speaker and editor emeritus at Feministing.com; and Tina Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize winner, author, co-author of FIXES, and a former editorial writer at The New York Times. It lists support from five foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation.

When I clicked on the "about" page to learn more about what solutions journalism is, I was surprised to read a somewhat detailed description that reads a bit as though it were written by a committee, which I guess it was. What I mean is that the authors struggle a bit to explain presicely what solutions journalism is–and what is isn't.

You might think, for example, that solutions journalism is concerned with stories in which some solution to a social problem was found, or is being tried. But the statement says "solutions journalism reports on responses that are working or not." Responses that are not working do not sound like solutions to me, but perhaps the group was trying to avoid sounding as if it was interested only in good-news journalism.

Solutions journalism is not good-news journalism, SoJo says. It is about "ideas, how people are trying to make them work, and their observable or measurable effects," they write. It is also not advocacy journalism, civic journalism, or public journalism, they write.

I get it, I think; this is not as clear as it might have been. That aside, this does seem to be a legitimate opportunity for reporters who have trouble scraping together expenses to do the stories they want to do. And in that effort, we certainly wish them well.

-Paul Raeburn