Positively newsworthy

I have a need to know what's going on in the world. It keeps me feeling connected and part of a bigger whole than the bubble of my life. Is it possible to know what's going on in the world without wanting to cry out of powerless empathy or without becoming completely blasé? I'm not sure. The main source of knowledge for me is the news, that fuzzy concept that used to mean hard-hitting well-investigated journalism but now largely seems to be corporate-owned scaremongering, ad-revenue driven lunacy.

BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Globe and Mail, New York Times... all the big news agencies that I bookmark all tend to paint a pretty nasty, negative picture of the world. I don't for a second pretend that we live in a perfect world. But surely there is more to what's going on than the bad stuff? I feel as if I'm hypersensitised to expect a negative headline at the top of the page everyday, and thinking about it, that's actually really sad.

I know the world is full of horrific things. Terrible floods, wars, death, despair, poverty and hunger. But surely that is not all that is going on in this world. I need a bit of balance, I need some optimistic and positive news. Maybe that's why I've embraced human interest stories like the ones so well presented on the This American Life podcast, and why I tend to watch presentations of successful inspirational people (e.g. TED talks). It's probably also why I tend to prefer to read blogs. And maybe it explains why lately I've been trawling the techie/geeky websites like CNET, BoingBoing, and Gizmodo... they are all about new exiting announcements and quirky links to interesting facts and people. They aren't really 'news' in the real sense of the word, but these media highlight that there is a flipside to the news coin. It's not to negate or to cast a blind eye on the negative news... but I feel like the "real" news is unfairly biased towards the negative sensationalistic stories. In doing so, the real news cannot by definition allow me to 'stay connected' with the world, because I'm missing out on all the good that is going on.

I'm on the lookout for alternative, more positive news source. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment to this post.