Engaging audiences with constructive journalism: how media audiences respond to solutions-focused storytelling in the news media

Constructive journalism is currently put forward as a remedy to some of the ailments that plague contemporary journalism and traditional news media. The constitutive element of constructive journalism is the prioritization of solutions-focused news stories.

Rather than merely reporting negative, conflict-driven news about societal problems, this approach argues that journalism should focus more on presenting solutions to issues.

The main argument for constructive journalism is sustained by psychological research suggesting that solutions-focused news stories could mitigate news avoidance, instill hope, and empower people to engage with societal issues on a personal and collective level.

Despite the increasing popularity in journalism practice, we know very little about the ways constructive journalism actually engages audiences. This project presents an audience-focused approach to the study of constructive journalism in the news media.

The aim is to examine how audiences respond (think, feel, and do) to journalistic storytelling that sets out to be solutions-focused, compared with traditional problem-focused stories.

The project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between media researchers at University of Gothenburg and neuroscience researchers at the Karolinska Institute and uses a mixed-method design integrating content analyses, reception analyses with focus groups, survey-based experiments, and laboratory experiments.