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“The one conversation I do remember us having is ‘Do we really like that? Is that a word?’” Allison McGinley, news director at Graham Media Group’s WKMG in Orlando, doesn’t remember who came up with the name “Solutionaries” for the station’s experimental new digital project last spring, but the title stuck. And it turns out solutionary is, in fact, a word. Here’s how the station defines it on its website:
A Solutionary is someone who recognizes a problem or injustice in society and comes up with creative and innovative ways to tackle those inequities, thus making the world a better place, one step at a time.
It turns out that the “one step at a time” approach also describes how McGinley and her team tackled the project itself, which is a model of collaborative innovation. Maybe we should come up with a new word for it — let’s say “Televisionary” — and a definition, of course:
A Televisionary is someone who recognizes an editorial challenge and comes up with creative and innovative ways to tackle that issue, thus making local TV news better, one story at a time.
The original idea for Solutionaries was to create what Graham Media describes as a “digital newscast” focused on people who are “making a difference” by implementing solutions to critical social issues. The proposal came from the Graham digital team, which incubated it at Table Stakes, the challenge-based innovation program at the Cronkite School that’s supported by the same Knight Foundation grant