Ethical Challenges in Constructive Journalism: A SWOT-Based Systematic Review

Constructive journalism (CJ) has emerged as a normative response to declining trust in news, growing audience avoidance, and the fatigue induced by relentlessly negative reporting, a practice complementing the watchdog mandate with solutions-focused, contextually rich, future-oriented reporting. The question of whether it represents a genuine ethical advancement or merely a fleeting reform narrative, however, is still debated. This systematic review synthesizes 70 peer-reviewed empirical studies (2017–2025) through a hybrid deductive–inductive coding strategy organized around six research questions covering CJ’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, its ethical challenges, and best practices for newsroom integration. The evidence reveals a practice whose strengths in audience engagement and professional renewal are inseparable from cognitive, behavioral and representational risks; whose ethical defensibility turns on three persistent tensions – engagement and detachment, scrutiny and promotion, independence and instrumentalisation – that the field has yet to manage; and whose democratic potential is conditional on editorial resourcing and normative safeguards rather than on stylistic adoption.