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One morning in the nineties, Geri Weis-Corbley was at her kitchen table, listening to NPR, when a story about the Bosnian war came on the air. As the reporter began describing the rape taking place in the war zone, Weis-Corbley found herself wondering about the impact the topic was having on her six-year-old son, who was sitting nearby. âI look over at him and think, âWow, heâs going to start hearing the news and not be a happy-go-lucky child anymore,ââ she recalled.Â
Weis-Corbley, who had previously freelanced for CNN, had long been frustrated with her editorsâ lack of appetite for positive stories. âGood news doesnât sell,â she recalls a colleague saying once. She didnât buy it. In August 1997, with the internet just taking off, she decided to launch the Good News Network (GNN), which promised to offset âthe daily barrage of the negativeâ from mainstream news.
A quarter century on, Weis-Corbleyâs news organization is still going strong. GNN has produced over twenty-one thousand positive articles, and itâs the top search result for âgood newsâ on Google in the US. Today, GNN is part of a booming ecosystem of positive-news sites that see themselves as a supplement toâand sometimes an escape fromâtypical news offerings. And, at a time of declining audience engagement in news, they believe theyâre just what the industry needs.
Since 1997, Weis-Corbley has found that traffic jumps after disasters, like the attacks of 9/11, or the 2008 financial crisis. Other sites that specialize in upbeat stories have seen the same thing. âWhen the pandemic started, we thought, âOh, no, this is really bad for us,ââ said Will Doig, executive editor of David Byrneâs Reasons to Be Cheerful project, which launched in August 2019. âIt turned out just the opposite, which was that COVID presented the opportunity for so many solutions to emerge that there just seemed to be an endless amount of content.â
Weis-Corbley says GNN runs two types of story, in roughly equal measure: hard news, like positive updates in science and business, and lighter storiesâheartwarming tales of goodwill, articles about animalsâwhich GNN calls âkindnesses.â That kind of stuff might lighten peopleâs mood after a long day, but to the cynic, itâs fluff. Branden Harvey, founder and editor of Good Good Good, a media organization founded in 2017, prefers to keep things more oriented around solutions. There are âa lot of other media companies out there that focus on what I call âfeel good newsâ versus âreal good news,â which is kind of like puppies and kittens and rainbows,â he says. âLike, thatâs greatââbut it wouldnât make it onto his website. âWhen Good Good Good sees heartbreak, pain, and injustice in the world, they acknowledge and mourn it,â the newsroomâs mission statement reads. âBut Good Good Good never stays there.â
Reasons to Be Cheerful takes a similar approach. Doig says it was founded on the idea that a hyperfocus on negativity in the media was leading to âan inaccurate picture of the world.â It sees its mission as rebalancing the scalesâwith rigorous journalism focusing on solutions that can make peopleâs lives better. âWe really try to make sure that everything that we do is journalistically rigorous and talking about a positive change. So not âOne thousand planes landed safelyââwhich isn’t really a change from anythingâbut rather, a change from something being bad to something getting better.â
Then comes the tension that all these newsrooms must navigate: in a politically polarized society, not everyone has the same definition of âgood.â A new minimum wage for New York Cityâs delivery couriers might sound like a win, but to business owners, it could be a major problem. A new offshore wind farm might make environmentalists happy but spark outrage from local activists. Weis-Corbley says some controversial topics, like abortion and gun rights, are off limits at GNN. Good Good Good does cover abortion, but goes out of its way to emphasize that it is ânot the authority on reproductive justice, and we do not wish to contribute to ongoing political vitriol.â Doig said Reasons to Be Cheerful has largely confined coverage of hot-button topics to its âviewpoints” section. âItâs always a case of nuance,â said Lucy Purdy, the editor in chief of the UK-based magazine Positive News. The site avoids specific coverage of political parties, for instance, but will examine âhow to tweak or even transform the political process to make it work for more people.â
All four newsrooms I spoke to said the uptick in traffic theyâd seen during COVID had continued to this day. Good Good Goodâs âGoodnewsletterâ subscribers more than doubled between January 2020 and January 2021âfrom 14,193 to 29,465âand continued growing, reaching 45,000 in August this year. And good-news stories can be increasingly found in more traditional outlets as well: the Washington Post, for instance, has an entire section dedicated to what it calls âInspired Life.â
âYou want a balanced diet,â Weis-Corbley says. âYou canât just eat junk food, or negative news, all the time.â
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