What’s your motto? It’s a good way to end. I’m very excited to talk about this idea, Solutions Journalism, this practice, because I think it’s a huge opportunity. We’re really seeing a framework change now that’s beginning to spread in the field of journalism. My motive, when I’ve been a journalist now for 25 years, and my motive when I went into it, I used to be a computer programmer, was really to be able to have a job where you learn from people every day, where you get to travel, where I love telling stories and hearing stories. But mainly it was really an idea that I could contribute my voice in a way that would help the world get better. And I think most journalists, actually, if you boil it down, remember why you went into this, they would say, I wanted to make the world better. Unfortunately, what happens because of the model in journalism is that they end up contributing very often to a system that provides a lot of information that is kind of like a smoke alarm beeping all the time. And if you think of the effect of this, we now know, and I know you’ve all been listening to this, from the behavioral science and the neuroscience and this new understanding we’re developing about ourselves, that in fact, if we give people a steady diet of watchdog sort of gloom and doom, we’re actually going to shoot ourselves in the foot. We’re going to reduce interest and engagement and optimism and all the things that are necessary to actually go out there and solve the problems that we’re writing about. So if you think about it, you know, if you look at journalism, you can actually step back for a second and say, well, how does journalism work? How does it actually work? Does journalism have a theory of change? So if journalism was a giant non-profit, would you give it a grant? We hope it doesn’t become a giant non-profit. So, and the question is, so what’s the theory of change? And if you look at what it does and you say it’s implicit theory of change, you say, what does journalism do most of the time? If you say this, then you have to conclude that its theory of change is that something along the lines of society will get better when we show it where it is going wrong. Chekhov’s had a theory of change. The playwright Chekhov had a theory of change, which was people will get better when we show them what they are like. It’s a very different theory of change. So if you think of that as a feedback system and you look at other feedback systems like parenting, a 10-year-old son, it would sort of be like, my son will get better if I point out his shortcomings at breakfast every day. Sort of like, it makes no sense. And if you hold it up to management science and all of the other areas that have studied what journalism really is, which is a feedback system, a kind of feedback system, it doesn’t make much sense to provide all of this information about the problems and really not talk about the responses. Not only does it not make sense in terms of the goal of getting people engaged, it doesn’t even tell the whole story. It’s not even accurate and comprehensive in terms of describing the world. So it fails on its own value system. So if you think about that, you know, if you look at what people really need to actually get engaged in information, if you raise awareness about problems, we now know that if you don’t also raise a sense of what you can do about it, a sense of efficacy around those problems, you actually reduce people. You move them away from, you get them to sit on the couch and eat ice cream and watch Breaking Bad, not to roll up their sleeves and lobby Congress. We now know that actually people have to see these very specific things. They have to have a sense of possibilities. What’s possible? Bright spots. Where are the ideas happening? They have to have a sense of really clear pathways, how-to steps. It has to be quite specific so that they can envision where they can place themselves. And there have to be aspirational pathways that are available to them that they can see that are, you know, and business magazines do this all the time. If you think of like all the names, Fortune, Money, Success, there’s no fast bankruptcy. It’s all aspirational. And for a very simple reason, people buy those magazines because they want to be successful. They’re not buying them to find out what’s going on. They’re buying them to find out what they can do. So, you now have, so okay, a couple of years ago, more than three years ago, my hero in journalism, Tina Rosenberg, who if you don’t know her, you should. She’s just an extraordinary human being, called me up and said, I have this idea for a column at the New York Times that will focus on solutions. Would you like to do it with me? And I was just like, I will do anything. So, we sat together when we brainstormed and we came up with ten reasons why this will work and this is important. And Tina had worked at the New York Times as an editorial writer for ten years. So, we were able to get a meeting with the head of the op-ed page. And we presented the idea to them and basically after five minutes, they said, sounds great, go do it. And the next fifty-five minutes of that one hour meeting were, and this is how little we’re going to pay you to do it. But, true. But the interesting thing about this column is we started thinking, how are we going to do this in such a way that it’s rigorous, that actually people take it seriously, it’s not a one-year thing that they try out and it fails. And we thought, the rigor had to be very, very key to it. And over time, we’ve developed a sort of methodology for doing this and we had a kind of surprising thing that happened over the three years, which is that, this is a story, by the way, that I wrote a while back, looking at the issue of toxic stress, which is just how debilitating it is for children who have multiple adverse experiences in early childhood that are not mediated or supported by, helped by adults to deal with those experiences. There’s all sorts of research now that shows that it’s very, very predictive of all sorts of bad things including cancer, diabetes, drug dependency, dropping out of school, all sorts of things. So you write a story about that and you think, well, that’s a pretty depressing story. That’s not going to be on the most emailed list. And in fact, it wouldn’t be on the most emailed list if we actually did the normal journalistic thing, which is to describe the problem of toxic stress and then leave it up to you to figure out what to do about it. But in fact, there’s lots of models that are emerging around the country about how to protect children from it. In schools, in head start programs, in high schools, in elementary schools, things parents can do. So really the lead of that story is what is possible to do about this problem of toxic stress. And if you write a story like that, what happens is people spread them because you’re increasing awareness, but you’re also increasing a sense of efficacy and people can tolerate that. They will share it. They will actually lean in much more to that problem. There’s no reason why journalists don’t do this all the time if the goal is to get people to lean into problems. And we’ve seen this over and over. I mean, stories about children very often go viral, as you can imagine, because parents are interested, but stories about homelessness almost never go viral. But stories about how to solve homelessness do go viral. So do stories about how to help young girls in Africa develop networks that increase their power and so forth. So over time, Tina and I realized that there’s a way to do these stories. Not only that they’re rigorous, these are wonky, nerdy stories. We use a ton of research to put them together, but that actually has teeth with the public and is considered serious journalism among people who call serious journalism serious journalism. So we thought, okay, well, what are the keys to this? The first thing is there has to be evidence that this is something that you can… My editor is always saying, what’s the case for this? Why are you choosing this organization over this other dropout organization, dropout prevention organization? And what’s the case? Why this one? And we say, well, they only… It might be they have three randomized studies that show that they’re really moving a needle, or it might be they’ve only been doing it for six months, but they have something to show for it at this point, which is quite compelling. So you have to make a case for it, and that case should be built on results. And the other thing that’s quite interesting is that when we thought about this over time, we realized we were writing these stories very much like popular detective stories. We actually came to call them how-done-its, you know? And we modeled it really very much after these things. Now, if you think about what is a how-done-it? A how-done-it starts with the problem, and then the narrative is driven, which is really interesting by the problem solving. How is Harry going to get out of this mess this time with Voldemort? You know, how is the case going to be solved this week? If you watch CSI or House or any of these shows, it’s always the same. They start with the problem, someone’s sick, and then it’s all this really interesting forensics about how the problem gets solved. If you think about social change, that’s what we’re doing every single day. How do we make sure that the kids with asthma don’t end up in the emergency room once a week? How do we protect kids from toxic stress? How do you actually make a city move people into permanent supportive housing steadily, systematically, so that we don’t have any homeless people? All these things are actually being done in pieces around the country. The how-tos are absolutely fascinating. So once we sort of developed this kind of methodology, people started coming to us from other news organizations and saying, wow, this is kind of interesting. Academics started assigning the columns, and we realized that actually this is a very simple practice. This is not rocket science. It’s very much like a kind of investigative journalism or explanatory journalism. It’s not a big movement. It’s a practice, and there are simple tools and frameworks for doing this, and it strengthens journalism. It strengthens engagement with people. It dramatically enlarges the story landscape that you put in your newspaper. It makes it much more interesting. So Tina and I with Courtney Martin started this network, and we thought it would take us sort of three, you know, a couple of years of just babbling to get partnerships with news organizations, because we thought there’s so much defensiveness. News organizations are as defensive. The only other sort of work environment that’s more defensive than a news organization is air traffic controllers. So, you know, it’s not easy to change it. It’s in the defensive, but at the same time there’s this great opportunity because there is a huge crisis, and a crisis should never be wasted. There’s an opportunity, you know, people say, when there’s a crisis, the ideas that are on the ground get picked up, and one of these ideas is you can really drive your journalism, improve your journalism by doing this. So we thought we’ll have a couple of news organizations begin to work with us. We have been overwhelmed in the last year. We literally started a year and a half ago with three people. Now we’re at 10 people, and we have pretty much every news organization we’ve approached or has approached us wants to work with us, and we have this kind of tsunami of opportunity. And this is mostly legacy media. We decided to start with legacy media initially because, you know, that’s sort of the, you know, where the deep changes have to happen. These are some of our partners, but there’s more than two dozen now. So this is, for an example, this is something we’re doing with the Seattle Times, which is a one-year series which we worked on together with them to look at solutions to public challenges and public education. So this was a story written by Claudia Rowe about a school, a very successful turnaround, a nine-month turnaround for a public school in Seattle that had dramatically increased reading and math scores over the course of nine months. And the story was written very much like a how-done-it. It was not charismatic principle saves the day. It was this is how she did it. This is how she reduced the teacher’s defensiveness. All of the specifics. So in some ways it reads much more like a blueprint than a poem. And a blueprint is usable by other people, which is why it gets shared. It’s not celebrating a hero. We say that the idea in these stories is the hero, not the sort of the do-gooder kind of person. We hate the word do-gooder. And we never call it good news. Banish that term. So this is, it doesn’t have to be done, you know, by huge metro newspapers. This is Tina, my colleague, did a one-hour webinar with the Fayetteville Observer, which was very interested, very focused on crime. And instead of focusing their series on crime, the focus of the series became how to solve crime. And so this is one of the things that they did. They realized that there’s a lot of research that blight and crime go together. So they said, who’s dealing well with blight? Well, it turns out Atlanta in the Eastlake neighborhood has a really good blight response. Memphis has done some really, really good stuff. They’ve increased their response to blight complaints by a factor of four. So they went to these places and they sort of brought back the ideas, and they created this four-part series. And they’ve done this a number of times now, and it’s fighting blight. It’s not we have blight. It’s a very, very different frame. And the reporter on this has said they’ve gotten great responses. Claudia Eroh at the Seattle Times said, in 23 years as a journalist, she’s never had such an outpouring of response as when she’s done these stories. So we started thinking, what is really a way to sort of a methodology to develop these stories? And we looked around and we found that some of our favorite writers and most popular writers do this all the time. Like, for example, take Michael Lewis. What did he do? He wanted to talk about the problem that money, the corrupting influence of money in baseball, the fact that the Yankees have so much money to buy players and other teams don’t. So instead of looking at the problem and complaining about it, he went to the one team, the positive deviant, that had figured out how to improve its position, even though they didn’t have much money. And that became the basis of Money Bowl. That’s basically a positive deviant. You look at a data set and you would look at this team, the Oakland A’s, and you’d say they shouldn’t be doing that well. They’re outperforming. Interesting, odd deviant in our statistics. Maybe something is happening there. And sure, you go in there and you discover that Billy Bean has figured out a different way of valuing baseball players. And then the whole story, if you read the book or saw the movie, is all about how he did it. How did he convince the scouts? How did they develop their new scoring systems for valuing players? If you read Atul Gawande, his reporting in The New Yorker, he’s always identifying a positive deviant and a negative deviant and showing what they do differently. And Paul Tuff, with How Children Succeed, did the same thing. He looked at the outliers. And the interesting thing about the positive deviant is they usually, it’s like in business. It’s like who’s our best salesperson? You know, let’s find out what they’re doing. The typical reflex in journalism with data is to find out where’s our, the worst district for racial profiling, and let’s write about them and slam it to them. And in some ways it’s like, it’s this theory that, you know, it’s like, you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let’s go kill the germs. Without any thinking that there are these things called antibodies, and you might want to strengthen them too, that there’s different ways, other ways of producing health than just being on the, on the, on the, on the killing germs, germs front. So out of this model, this positive deviant sort of analysis model, we developed a project with the Knight Foundation and the California Health Care Foundation where we identify positive deviance from large data sets that the Institute from Health Metrics and Evaluation has. We identify these interesting places. Why, this is a map of changes in physical activity from 2000 to 2010 in the United States that was put out. Now if you look, look at the blue and purple over there, you’ll see that Kentucky is dramatically outperforming the rest of the country when it comes to improving physical activity. When we actually went to Kentucky and we asked people, journalists there, why is this happening? Nobody knew. Well that’s a really great opportunity for an investigative piece. What is Kentucky doing that makes it blue and purple on this map where most everyone else is a different color? And that’s the kind of opportunities that, that you have with this framework. So the one thing that’s really important to stress and it’s very, very important for, for you guys is that we don’t mean good news. There are a lot of solutions, journalism and postures out there and if people start talking about them, the news organizations will get very allergic and they will walk out. You know, and one of them is, you know, simply this idea that these are hero stories. I love Nancy Hughes’s work by the way. She’s a brilliant, wonderful change maker. But if you write the story and frame it as a hero story, it’s not, the hero is the idea. It’s not the person. That’s a feature story. It’s a different thing. The other thing is these silver bullet stories. These one-off, this is a story about a soccer ball that will change the word that unfortunately appeared in the New York Times. This is another story. Sorry about Tom’s shoes. We did a, Jennifer, we did a column on them and they’re a bit overhyped and they’ve gotten a lot of these kind of favor for friend columns that are very, very fluffy and uncritical. I do think that their intentions are great but I think the model has issues. Think tank stories. What we should do with education, you know, I mean, how do we, how to change education? And finally the afterthought. You know, we’ve done our one-hour documentary showing how terrible things are. Go to our website now and what you can do about it. It’s sort of left like for the last minute. And finally, oh, there’s Instant Activists. I’ll skip over that one. Chris P. Bacon. Heartwarming stories about nice things that people are doing to help people. Wonderful feature stories. These are Thanksgiving stories. These are not solutions journalism. And this doesn’t work. Okay, so what’s missing? And simply, really, what’s missing from journalism now is this deep understanding of the adaptive responses that are all around the world. We’re living in this sort of social renaissance. There’s so many new ideas emerging around the world, responses to every problem. Some of them are terrible and they don’t work. Some of them are fantastic and they really need, we’re in the lighting business, they really need the attention of journalism so that they can be scrutinized and they can grow if necessary. And you know, historically in the 20th century, the journalists thought that the big problem were secrets. We have to uncover secrets. And it’s true. It’s not just people doing terrible things that are hidden from view today. It’s those adaptive responses. It’s people doing remarkable things that are hidden from view. And the opportunity today is really profound to change the system to make that available to everybody. So thank you very much. Thank you.