One of my hats is as the curator of the Not All News Is Bad web site and mailing list. Each day I post one positive story gleaned from recent news.
The criteria are rather simple: besides being relatively recent, the story should be something that most would agree is good news. At a more practical level it needs to make me smile.
I started Not All News Is Bad in response to the current climate of fake, sensationalistic, over-dramatic, negative or “bad” news that overwhelms us every day. Traditional media (whatever that is) is full of it, but with our increasing reliance on social media for our news and information it seems like the atmosphere has become ever more polluted with the stench of negativity.
To be even more honest, I started it for myself. I simply decided to seek out one positive story every day. Just one. Then I started posting them on my Facebook wall with the tag #notallnewsisbad so as to share them with others who might find it interesting and hopefully a little uplifting.
Then, being the entrepreneur that I am I found that the domain notallnewsisbad.com was available, so I grabbed it, threw together a WordPress blog, added a tag line (“An antidote for everything else”) and an email subscription form and the rest, as they say, is history. At this writing the assocaited Facebook page (I had to do one of those, too) has 147 likes, and the newsletter over 1,200 subscribers.
But I really did it for myself.
I needed that antidote.
In doing so I’ve built myself a little repository of sources that I turn to. I don’t check each every day, but I touch bases with them all regularly. Honestly, the problem isn’t finding something good to share, it’s choosing just one from the many I find each day. That’s a good problem to have.
I told you… not all news is bad. 🙂
Those sources include (but are not limited to), and in no particular order:
- Future Crunch: “A fortnightly cluster**** of science, technology, Berlin DJs and good news. Not necessarily in that order.” (And yes, they’re not adverse to using “colorful” language, but the items they link to are almost always family friendly.)
- The Week – Good News: a weekly newsletter with around five good news stories.
- Good News Network: “… a clearinghouse for the gathering and dissemination of positive news stories from around the globe, confirming what people already know — that good news itself is not in short supply; the broadcasting of it is.”
- Good News Shared: “We are on a mission to highlight as many positive, charitable stories as we can. Why? Because good stuff happens, and it’s important we hear about it.”
- The Optimist Daily: “We use algorithms and human editors to create a daily summary of real news focused on the things that ARE working and the solutions that we can apply to our communities, and to our global civilization.”
- Postitive.News: “Online and in print, we publish quality, independent journalism about progress and possibility. When much of the media is full of doom and gloom, instead Positive News is the world’s first media organisation dedicated to reporting on what’s going right.”
- Sunny Skyz: “… promote good news stories from around the world. It has since evolved into a place that promotes love, laughter and kindness, in the form of videos, blogs, pictures, jokes and more.”
- The Washington Post – The Optimist newsletter: “Stories that inspire to start your week on a positive note.”
- The Washington Post – Inspired Life newsletter: “Inspiration, help and humor to improve your life and the lives of others.”
- Huffington Post, Good News topic.
- MSN, Good News topic.
- The Today Show, Good News topic.
- The Reddit Uplifting News subreddit.
- Random other news sources that cross my path.
- Friends and family who’ve started forwarding interesting stories to me.
- Not All News Is Bad subscribers who’ve started forwarding interesting stories to me.
That Reddit subreddit is perhaps my most frequent go-to source for good news.
In most cases I’ll sign up for an email newsletter or subscribe to an RSS feed if there is one.
I try to trace the notices I get from the sources above to an originating source of a story, if I can (and, to be honest, if I have the time). Sometimes I’ll select something other than that source if I feel it’s better presented elsewhere. I generally don’t feature videos, unless there’s an accompanying article to be read. Similarly I tend not to link directly to Facebook or other social media posts, unless they’re public, and particularly noteworthy. And while I try to avoid paywalls when I can, there are so many ways around them that I’ll often share links from those that at least offer the “X stories per month free”.
As you can see there are a lot of sources of good news. Bad news seems like it’s always in our face, so it’s incumbent on us to go out and find those positive stories.
And that’s what I try to do. 🙂