Amid the onslaught of news in recent months, The Cut’s features editor, Catherine Thompson, felt it necessary to brighten up the internet.
“We wanted to pick our heads up and say, ‘OK, where are the helpers and who has been working to make positive change?’” said Thompson.
The resulting package was a project involving multiple editors and writers called “100 Days, 100 Small Victories,” compiling images, blurbs and news items meant to lift readers’ spirits. “Needed this!” was a common response to the project.
While positive news stories were primarily associated with corny animal clickbait in the 2010s, today’s audiences are hungry for something more substantial to feel good about. A 2023 study from the Survey Center on American Life found that 80% of Americans thought political news was negative, while over half saw positivity in art, fashion, entertainment, sports and science news.
“It’s really important to have some kind of positive news experience,” said Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist who co-authored the textbook “Exploring Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Well-Being.” “The shift in emotion lowers stress, lowers cortisol, broadens attention and increases creativity, but it also increases the cognitive flexibility to think about other people.”
Profiling people creating change in their communities is the focus of NBCU Academy’s Storytellers vertical. “We take the alerts that we receive in the news and research what people are doing about it,” said former Storytellers associate reporter Iris Kim. “What are people on the ground actually trying to do to help?”
Below, Kim and other journalists discuss how to effectively report on positive news without veering into cornball territory.
Focus on innovations and improvements
Earlier this year, Vox introduced two newsletters to help readers through a never-ending news cycle: The Logoff, which is written by senior editor Patrick Reis and focuses on one political story of the day, and Good News, written weekly by editorial director Bryan Walsh about science and research innovations that people might be missing in the news.
“We often miss some of the big progress the world has made on important issues,” said Walsh, who oversees Vox’s Future Perfect section, as well as the site’s tech, climate and world teams. “Readers don’t want that steady diet of just apocalyptic news. I see my job as being able to look around at what’s happening in the world and tell people about things that are good and the improvements in the environment.”
Walsh makes it a point not to include “cat rescued from tree” stories, but to focus on news such as the sharp reduction in child mortality, how trade has reduced global poverty and a potential, affordable vaccine for dementia currently in the works.
“I’m always looking out for scientific studies, because there’s a lot of cool stuff happening there,” Walsh said. “I like to look for if something’s happening in the environment, which is an area where a lot of people assume the story is just 100% bad. I think the story is a little more complicated, a little more positive than it’s often portrayed.”
So far, readers have embraced the Good News newsletter and its focus on optimistic study results, scientific innovations and societal improvements.
“When people get it, they open it, respond and talk to me,” Walsh said. “It’s funny, though — if I include anything that’s not 100% good, I get responses saying, ‘Wait, that’s not what I signed up for.’ People like the change of pace. It’s a very engaged audience.”
Find the helpers
In 2017, humanitarian photographer Branden Harvey founded Good Good Good as a quarterly newspaper — an optimistic move at a time when online publications were more successful than print.
And yet, nearly a decade later, Good Good Good still prints a newspaper, along with publishing articles on its site, which receives up to a million visitors monthly. It also has a podcast, a newsletter and an Instagram account with over 400,000 followers.
Across all of those platforms, Good Good Good focuses on selecting stories using the old advice from children’s TV host Fred Rogers: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
“Myself, our other writers, Branden and our social media team ask each other, ‘How are we meeting this? Who are we inspired by? What kind of information seems to be most helpful to people right now?’” said Kamrin Baker, the publication’s managing editor.
Focusing on groups lending a helping hand is also a big part of NBCU Academy’s Storytellers, where Kim said they apply a solutions journalism approach to amplify the hard work of community leaders.
“It’s been really rewarding to know that there are people out there doing the work that they do, not because they’re chasing fame or money, but because they genuinely care about their communities,” Kim said. “And then as part of our job, we get to profile the work that they’re doing.”
Recognize the definition of ‘good news’ can vary
Thompson and her team encouraged The Cut’s writers to bring all big and small ideas for the “100 Days, 100 Small Victories” project to weekly pitch meetings. The brainstorms produced a wide range of ideas, from a photo of U.S. Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester, the first two Black women to serve in the Senate together at the same time, to Lady Gaga’s latest album making us “dance like it was 2008 again.”
“We only included items where we know the outcome was something positive and moving us forward,” Thompson said.
One story in the package was about Civic Match, a free platform created by the nonprofit Work for America that helps government workers find new jobs in public service. It was originally a PR pitch that the staff liked but didn’t necessarily have the bandwidth to turn into a full article. It fit in perfectly with the project.
When you look for positive things, you can find them, Thompson said. “We had a hodgepodge of pitches that we had gotten about various efforts in politics, and just ideas that our own staff had about what they found notable or inspiring, or what was helping them,” she said.
