Good News, Everyone!

WCityMike — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:05:27 -0800

Maybe the world isn't as good as this (more on that), but there's still ... good news, everyone! Lately, the news is so depressing lately that even the NBC Nightly News anchors need cheering up. Brian Williams' nightly broadcasts became so depressing his viewers complained (start at 1:00 into the video), and so he reached out and asked his viewers to pass along good news. They gave him plenty (RSS), enough to start a series, "Making a Difference." This need for optimistic news, noticed even by PR agencies, has guided U.K. papers like the East London Yellow Advertiser and the Burton Mail to run "good news only" pages or editions. But these papers are hardly the very first forays of the press or populace into the realm of good news. "If it bleeds, it leads" may be a fairly popular pressroom sentiment, but not in the following venues ... Twitter has the Los Angeles Times' Good News Twitter channel (RSS, replies, replies RSS); Optimistic News (RSS, replies, replies RSS, Facebook); happytweets (RSS, replies, replies RSS); and the search keyword #goodnews (RSS). Delicious.Com has busy tags for goodnews (RSS) and optimism (RSS). LiveJournal communities have a few good "good news"-aggregating communities, such as Happy News (RSS), OnlyGoodNews (RSS), Helpers (RSS), and Only_Good_News. Heck, if fed the right search terms, Google News (RSS) can sometimes even turn up glimmers of hope amongst such a barren landscape as mainstream media reporting. But the MSM just dabbles in good news; there are plenty of sites whose very purpose has been to provide a "good news" counterbalance to the "bad news" bias often seen in modern-day media. There are the big five "good news" monoliths: Happy News (RSS), Good News Now (RSS²), Global Good News³ (RSS⁴), Good News Daily, and Now Public: Good News (RSS). There's the Good News Network (RSS), Only Positive News (RSS), or Simply Happy News (RSS). There are the websites of magazines such as Ode Magazine (RSS) (who bill themselves as being "for intelligent optimists") and YES! Magazine (RSS). There's Things are Good (RSS), Optimism World (RSS), or Gimundo (RSS). There's Good News Blog (RSS), and the Good News Broadcast (RSS, video podcast, podcast RSS). There's the Digg-like Great News Network (RSS), as well as Heroic Stories (RSS) and Positive News From Around the World. There is, as earlier recommended on Ask Metafilter, the Speculist's Better All The Time (RSS⁵) — as well as GiftAnonymous, about random acts of (relatively non-saccharine) kindness, and the CSM's Making a Difference section. And there's DarynKagan.Com (RSS) (warning: autoplay.). [As well as all of this wrapped up into one big-ass RSS feed. :)] * * * * * * * * ¹And its columnists, which don't appear to be in its RSS feed: David Pollay (RSS), WonderQuest (RSS), Craig Harris (RSS), Silent Kimbly (RSS), Susan Scholl (RSS), and Reasons to Be Hopeful (RSS). ²A Yahoo! Pipes unification of a few subsections, which I'll provide here separately in case I ever forget and zap the pipe: green RSS, health RSS, heroes RSS, video RSS, more good news RSS. ³Although most of the sites linked-to herein aren't particularly religious (on purpose – searching for "good news" results in a heavy pollination of Christian sites amongst the search engine results), this one seems to be run by adherents of TM; however, its selection of covered positive news stories doesn't seem to be particularly biased towards that, and it appeared to be a site that was kept fairly well up-to-date. ⁴Yahoo! Pipe RSS feed created to filter only the news items starting with the phrase 'Positive:'. Original RSS feed. ⁵Yahoo! Pipe RSS feed created to include only this feature. Original RSS feed. * * * * * * * * Postscript: Not directly on point, but still worth including, there's an interesting blog post about Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists and the Internet personalities each kind of person cites, as well as a really interesting TED talk by Marty Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism.