How can I create loyalty with Reuters solutions journalism?

Reaching wider, monetized audiences is a cornerstone of digital best practice. But loyalty and retention are crucial values too.

REUTERS/Amit Dave

By Giles Crosse | Oct 16, 2019

For audiences, solutions reporting cuts out negativity and builds inspirational narratives that promise real world change. For digital strategists, it offers a way to win hearts and minds, with associated long term engagement, brand loyalty and monetization potential.

Given today’s challenging media payment models, solutions reporting may also offer a path to financially sustainable journalism, delivered in the examples below by transparent, engaging stories on a top millennial theme; climate.

Amid concerns reported back in 2016 that millennials and Gen Z ‘feel the world they inhabit is one of perpetual struggle – dystopian, unequal and harsh,’ positivity on climate reporting can offer genuine hope to a generation who feel profoundly anxious and distrustful, engaging them psychologically with today’s media outlets.

Solutions reporting, climate and winning young minds

A recent Reuters Foundation story by Megan Rowling illustrates perfectly how solutions reporting builds loyalty and real world action.

The story describes how the plight of rainforests has stormed up the global agenda in recent weeks, as forest fires rage in the Amazon and the Congo Basin, while a UN climate science report backed forest protection as a key pillar of action to curb global warming.

Where’s the solution?

Crucially, the story doesn’t just focus on the negatives, for example the fact that meeting a landmark target to slash by at least half losses of natural forests by 2020 is likely to be impossible. Rather, it highlights positive action for delivering change; that despite some gloomy evidence, an international push was due to launch in New York, renewing promises to protect the world’s forests, to join up the many actions now taking place.

Further, The New York declaration’s longer-term goal of striving to end forest loss by 2030 was still feasible, researchers said. The story also highlights solutions seeking more funding, alongside measures to regulate demand in illegally sourced timber and reform subsidies to ensure they protect forests.

“We need to re-energise commitment, action and financing,” said Craig Hanson of the US-based World Resources Institute.

There’s further positivity in the reporting: Indonesia has been a bright spot, Charlotte Streck, co-founder and director of Climate Focus noted, where government bans on clearing peatland and new concessions for logging and plantations have been complemented by more palm oil companies earning certification for sustainable production.

‘Reading political news in the age of Trump leaves people stressed, angry, and overwhelmed’

– NiemanLab

As more and more audiences avoid the news in a post Trump/Brexit world, the impact of negativity has a very real effect on audiences even engaging with news; let alone reaching a point where they come back for more. That’s why solutions writing and inherent positivity has so much to offer.

A picture tells a thousand words

Additionally, Reuters offers the finest, most powerful imagery on the climate battle, using pictures to help push home the importance of solutions-based stories.

Reuters also covered people dancing in New York’s streets to protest the burning of the Amazon; a truly positive story that also illustrates how readers can get involved, and, should they choose, act in a fun way to change things for the better.

Want to engage millennials with positive, solutions-based reporting, and learn more about this compelling new journalistic form? Trial Reuters Connect to experience our solutions journalism.