Methods

Our project builds upon research the Metamorphosis Project⁴⁸ has been doing on the communication needs of residents in South LA and other diverse communities since 1998. It follows an attempt by the Metamorphosis Project to strengthen the South LA storytelling network in two ways. First, the project brought community organizations together with local and ethnic media for a series of workshops, which helped all the participants to overcome communications barriers that have plagued the story “pitching” process by giving them a shared language and greater understanding of their intersecting community interests. Second, the workshops facilitated the production of a series of stories leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the Watts riots (“Watts Revisited”) and ensured that these stories were solutions-oriented.

To understand how South LA audiences responded to the stories that came out of this collaboration and how residents would process the solutions journalism format more broadly, a series of six focus group discussions centered around a storyⁱⁱ adapted from the “Watts Revisited” collaboration.⁴⁹ Two versions of the story were edited to offer examples of either A) a solutions-oriented story or B) a non-solutions version of the same story.ⁱⁱⁱ While both stories examined the issue of vacant lots and the lack of outdoor spaces where children can play in South LA, only the solutions version looked at efforts to transform vacant lots into parks (see the Appendix for sample text).

Focus group participants, recruited with the assistance of community organizations, included a total of forty-eight African-American and Latino South LA adults (twenty-three women, twenty-five men; ages twenty-one to fifty-nine) who had lived in the area for a minimum of two years and reported at least occasionally reading news articles. Participants were assigned to groups clustered by ethnicity and language—three African-American groups (English-language) and three Latino groups (one Spanish-language and two English-language, in accordance with participants’ language preferences). Moderators for each group were Los Angeles natives and shared the participants’ ethnic background.

Upon arrival, participants in four of the six groups read the solutions version of the story before beginning the discussion. The other two control groups first read the non-solutions version. After volunteering their own media practices and attitudes toward how outlets cover South LA, the groups discussed the stories they read. After this, they were given the alternate version of the story to read and discuss, before being introduced to and invited to reflect upon the concept of solutions journalism. All focus groups were videotaped and transcribed. Transcripts were then thematically coded and analyzed.