Investing in Care Journalism: Key Takeaways

As part of this project, the Better Life Lab offered the solutions journalism framework to our cohort of reporters. Each reporter worked independently (with editorial support available upon request) and used the best of journalism skills to report, interview, search data, and write their own stories.

Here are the key takeaways from our child care innovation reporting grants process:

• Narrative change requires sustained, long-term efforts to highlight the stories of real people and uplift solutions.
• Reporting grants are a useful mechanism for continuing a conversation about policy issues affecting real people, and increasing the diversity of stories.
• By relying on reporting grants as a storytelling mechanism, we are building capacity and growing the chorus of reporters who can write effectively about care and care policy.
• Understanding that policy reporting takes more time and expertise means that more funding and support from media outlets and journalism nonprofits should be provided for the journalists who undertake such endeavors. Support can take various forms, including additional compensation, editorial feedback, and giving solutions-oriented stories priority placement in publication.
• To reach a wide variety of both broad and targeted audiences, varying the mediums in which to tell these stories matters a great deal. Millions of people, parents, kids, providers, and employers rely on our child care systems to make our economy work, and they receive their news in myriad ways. By diversifying our storytelling mechanisms, we are able to reach more people across political, geographic, demographic, and other divides, particularly those that traditional print media sources could miss.