Top Tips: Can you be the bearer of good news?

Relentlessly bad news makes people anxious and depressed. But there is good news to tell, if you make an effort to find it.

In News Decoder’s Top Tips, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s Top Tip, correspondent Norma Hilton explains why it is important to balance bad news with good news and how to find solutions-oriented stories. Top Tips are part of our open access learning resources. You can find more of our learning resources here. And learn how you can incorporate our resources and services into your classroom or educational program or by forming a News Decoder Club in your school.

People disconnect from news media that seems to only report bad news. News feeds leave people overwhelmed and depressed. Good news is harder to find. 

Most news companies run on business models that reward clicks and retention rates. That usually means news stories cover crime, disaster or sex. And while investigative journalism, the kind of journalism I’ve spent most of my career in, focuses on holding power to account, even we cannot escape the industry standard. 

“We have evolved to pay attention to alarming information,” said Denise Baden, a writer and professor of sustainable business at University of Southampton who has been studying the effect of news on human behaviour for years. “So, when you go online and look and see, ‘Oh my God, terrible things are happening’ we will turn and look. And I think it hijacks that instinctive response.”

Historically, Baden says, more constructive or positive news was also associated with propaganda or frivolous subjects. One journalist she interviewed during her research sneered at the idea of covering a royal wedding. “Anything to do with love or relationships or peace is kind of [seen as] ‘girly’ and the proper stuff is hardcore violence,” she said. “And the journalists who get the awards are the ones right in the thick of the war zones.”

I’ve experienced this myself: someone in the journalism industry asked me why I wrote about K-pop, as though it was a massive step backwards, after covering humanitarian crises for most of my career. 

I shrugged and simply said: “It’s fun.” The piece they were talking about was eventually published in The Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in Canada.

What’s so bad about feeling good?

When the world around you looks like it’s on fire, you start believing it’s the only thing that’s possible. You stop believing in good things and the goodness of humanity. 

“Our brains have not evolved to have the worst of the world’s catastrophes actually happening and projected, dished up to us on a constant 24/7 diet,” Baden said. “So it’s not surprising that people either switch off or they get addicted to doomscrolling.”

In 1997, one study found people can become more anxious or depressed after just 14 minutes of consuming news. In 2021, catalyzed by social media, researchers at the University of Essex found similar results: two to four minutes of news related to Covid led to “immediate and significant reductions in positive effect.” 

“It kind of prompts a passive despair,” Baden said. “It can also lead to cynicism because you think the world is a bad place. If we’re only shown people behaving badly, then that normalizes people behaving badly.”

Anthony Feinstein, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and a leading expert on the trauma faced by journalists, said that this can have dire long-term consequences not just on people consuming news but the journalists covering them. 

“It can become so overwhelming, it can become so all-consuming that you don’t have the energy or the time or the desire to work on your relationships or to put energy to something else,” Feinstein said.

Let’s connect instead of disconnect to news.

Your emotions can shut down: “The downside of that is of course then relationships fade,” he said. “They start becoming problematic. They break up. There are separations, there’s divorces. And that can have very negative consequences for a person’s emotional health.”

Disillusioned with the current state of news, Baden researched what people actually want. She exposed people to negative and solution-focused versions of similar stories — war versus peace talks, environmental degradation versus clean-up efforts — and asked them how they felt. 

She also spoke with a number of journalists who believed that they must expose people to the bad news in the world so they feel compelled to do something. Baden’s work found the exact opposite to be true.

A majority of people, almost half, said they prefer positive news. Another 47% said they had no preference and only 6% said they prefer negative news.

People felt upset, hostile, ashamed, nervous, afraid, pessimistic and anxious in response to the more traditional negative news and much more optimistic, hopeful, happy and less anxious to the positive news.

“The more optimistic they are, the more likely they are to do something,” Baden said. “Significantly likely.”

Journalism focused on solutions

In contrast to stories that focus negatively on problems, solutions journalism finds the root causes, responses to and impacts of social problems. These stories also help people understand how complex systems work, and how they can be improved

“It’s about showing what can be done,” Baden said. “It considers the impact of news on the person receiving it and it tries to tie it to a solution.”

It’s a way to connect to readers and listeners instead of pushing them away. But how do you find good news to tell?

You can start with specialty publications like science journals or websites for nonprofit organizations. They usually have blogs that can give you good story ideas or lead to interesting innovation in their fields. Social media is another place to find these stories.

Take the story of Legendary Glamma for example. She became famous on Instagram for her wild and interesting fashion sense. She’s also in her 80s and from Zambia, both facts interesting enough that she has about a quarter of a million followers on Instagram and her story was most recently covered by the BBC.

There are interesting stories out there.

If you’re interested in pop culture and celebrities, there’s good news stories there too. Megan Thee Stallion recently did a WIRED interview where she inhabited her own musical persona but she spoke about wanting to start a nursing home that feels like a real home for elderly people, inspired by her grandmother.

A good rule of thumb is to structure everything using an inverted pyramid where you begin with the most interesting or important information. Use strong words — ‘rise’ instead of ‘increase’, ‘excavate the truth’ instead of ‘dig up evidence supporting the facts’, ‘capsized her world’ instead of ‘changed everything she knew about the world.’

You can speak to ordinary people and experts who are doing interesting things or who try to find solutions to the problem you write about. Think of unlikely places where you can find them. The more diverse your sources, the more interesting your story will be. For example, for my piece for The Toronto Star I spoke to a Nigerian man who was modelling for companies like Louis Vuitton and creating content in Seoul, South Korea. 

I found him on YouTube and thought, “what is it like for him to do that?” And then I drew threads to the wider economic impact of foreigners moving to South Korea (and that involved translating some Korean tax documents as well!).

Most importantly when writing, ask yourself: what would my grandma care about? Yes, you read that correctly. It sounds odd. But when you’re talking to your grandma there’s no superfluous language, no luxury of artistic expression. Grandma just wants to know what’s going on. 

So, tell her.

Norma Hilton is an independent journalist covering everything from K-pop to murder-suicides. She has worked in Canada, the United States, Australia, Singapore and Bangladesh.