Type the words "why is the news" into Google and the site's Autocomplete function reveals a widespread frustration among news consumers.
The suggestion is that readers and viewers aren't exactly satisfied with the media's longstanding reliance on an approach to news based on the adage "if it bleeds, it leads." And this hunger for coverage that goes beyond dysfunction and disaster is about much more than what people are typing into their Google search bars.
In 2013, Wharton Business School professor Jonah Berger and his colleague Katherine Milkman studied the lists of most-emailed news stories from The New York Times over a six-month period, and found that the most shared articles evoked positive feelings from readers. And a 2014 national survey conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health found that watching and reading the news was a significant contributor to some respondents' day-to-day stress.
Here's hoping that more news outlets will take these findings to heart, continuing to report on all the most important stories in the world but giving readers the full picture at the same time. That picture, as anyone with Google access knows, includes not just coverage of war, tragedy, corruption and everything going wrong, but also the stories of people working to find and implement solutions to our world's biggest problems.
NationSwell, Positive News, and The Solutions Journalism Network are just a few outlets already focusing on sharing positive news stories with the world.