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Newspeople often just point to problems and walk away.
Lately they've been trying to find what works.
U.S. News & World Report ran a list of 1998's "Silver Bullets" - putative solutions to problems as diverse as land mines, obesity, and ill-educated college athletes. The magazine featured the list as a year-end cover story, in an effort to "correct a chronic imbalance in journalism," it said. (The first such list ran the year before.) Land mines can be removed efficiently and safely with new "gizmos" that have been little covered in the press, US. News reported. College athletes can be better educated if they are given academic scholarships to study after they finish playing on their schools' teams. As an antidote to obesity, US. News suggested (tongue somewhat in cheek) a "Twinkie tax." If fatty foods were taxed like alcohol and cigarettes, people might consume less of them.
In the same vein, the Los Angeles Times capped a recent series on the widespread use of assault weapons in the United States with a story datelined Ballarat, Australia. Its subject? Australia's successful program to buy back more than 500,000 semiautomatic firearms and pump-action shotguns. And the crux of The New York Times Magazine's 7,700-word examination of the country's most drastic welfare-to-work program was writer Jason DeParle's implicit question, "Is this a solution?" DeParle gave a thoughtful, complex answer. Wisconsin's welfare rolls fell by 60 percent in a decade, he noted. But because the state is now offering poor families health care and child care, Wisconsin went from paying $9,700 per family on welfare to $15,700 for the same average family off welfare.
This new journalistic hunt for solutions is also being mounted in television, midsized and smaller newspapers, and alternative publications.
ABC News' World News Tonight with Peter Jennings aired a story on a San Francisco halfway house called Delancey Street that raises its entire $7 million annual budget running its own restaurant, moving company, roller blade rental shop, and two dozen other businesses staffed by the program's ex-convicts. About 9,000 of Delancey Street's 12,000 participants have stayed away from prison and drugs, says Mimi Silbert, a criminologist who, together with a felon and four addicts, started Delancey Street twenty-five years ago.
The San Diego...