Media Voices co-host Peter Houston sends out a weekly newsletter called The Magazine Diaries. Each edition shares the best magazine publishing ideas he comes across for you to steal, adapt or reuse.

This week I offer up some positive antidotes that you can steal to help overcome the depressing fact that more and more people all over the world are avoiding the news because it’s having a negative impact on their mood.

Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions

That was a mantra repeated regularly by one of the best bosses I ever had. It’s also the approach that Sean Wood and the team at Positive News are advocating to overcome the news avoidance crisis.

Research from the Reuters Institute’s annual Digital News Report shows that the number of people who say they avoid news often or sometimes, has increased sharply. In the UK, 46% of people say they are news avoiders, double the number five years ago.

In response, the team at Positive News are calling for an end to the “bad news bias” across the media. They believe that a ‘solution-focused’ approach should get more prominence. By reporting on progress as well as problems, the media can keep people informed and engaged without the news negatively impacting their wellbeing.

Magazines have a long history of providing solutions in print, but online it’s easy to be seduced by the traffic from the outrage engine. Whatever platform your on, giving people solutions to problems seems like a logical, if much underused, way to help people feel better and – maybe – make things better.

Get some perspective

There’s a new Sheriff in town at CNN and he thinks the network should be making much less use of the BREAKING NEWS banner. CNN President Chris Licht told employees that, in the future, the banner should signify ‘something BIG is happening. Stop what you are doing and watch’.

Licht said the impact of the breaking news banner has become lost on the audience. Use of the banner should be limited to one hour unless the news concerns events like school shootings, major weather events or the death of a world leader.

The realisation that this kind of televisual clickbait isn’t working sounds like a welcome step away from the kind of anxiety-inducing headlines that turn people off. Shouting at your audiences all the time is counterproductive; when everything is important, nothing is.

Spinach and cheesecake…

I spoke with Katie Vanneck Smith earlier in the year and she told me how her slow-news site Tortoise has been programming in ‘a bit more joy’ to counteract a relentlessly rough news cycle. She described this wonderfully, saying, “There’s been a lot of spinach. And we all need a bit of cheesecake.”

A great example of this approach is The Flock newsletter’s ‘Take five’ weekly news summary. Publisher Jennifer Crichton offers the round-up as a way to keep her audience informed without the need to dive headfirst into the anxiety of 24-hour rolling coverage.

Jennifer doesn’t shy away from the big stories; in her latest issue she says her biggest challenge was not packing the five exclusively with UK government scandals. But, immediately after reporting the doom and gloom, she follows up with five good news stories to counteract the negativity – sending her readers away with a good taste in their mouth.


Republished with kind permission. Subscribe to The Magazine Diaries to get three steal-able ideas in your inbox every Friday.

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