What happens when a news consumer trades the daily scroll of crisis headlines for reporting that examines not only what is broken but also what is being fixed? Oliver Balch set out to answer that question for Positive News, committing to a 48-hour experiment in which he would read only solutions-focused or constructive journalism.
Balch, who describes himself as someone without a television, absent from TikTok, a rare visitor to YouTube and long departed from X, assumed the assignment would be simple. He selected a weekend for the detox, reasoning that breaking news slows on Saturdays and Sundays and that he would spend less time on his devices and more time on other pursuits.
The early hours went well. Balch wrote that he felt relieved not to hear a radio broadcast upon waking, and even somewhat exhilarated, as though he were violating an unspoken rule. The quiet, he noted, gave him room to breathe, to consider the day ahead and to determine his own mood before the news determined it for him.
Within an hour or two, however, anxiety set in. Balch described a sense that the world was proceeding without him and an urge to open the news applications on his phone. He resisted, telling himself that Donald Trump does not care whether he is current on the latest Truth Social post, and that no amount of familiarity with the sub-points of the latest Middle East peace plan would change the situation.
The following Monday, after the experiment concluded, Balch consulted An Nguyen, a visiting professor at Bournemouth University's Media School and a specialist in digital journalism. According to Balch's account in Positive News, Nguyen described an evolutionary "awareness instinct" — a human drive to learn about potential threats. Where that instinct once meant watching for a sabre-toothed tiger at the cave mouth, Nguyen suggested, it now might mean worrying about rogue AI erasing humanity.
Balch found that explanation only partly satisfying. He wrote that artificial intelligence is frightening but is not a tiger at the door, at least not yet, and that his own constant news checking serves partly as distraction and partly as titillation — the pleasure of eavesdropping on the world's latest drama.
A second argument from Nguyen struck Balch as more persuasive and more reassuring: that active citizenship requires knowledge of the problems around us. That left Balch with a question. He follows the news and knows about record temperatures, inequality spikes and social care crises. What then? Nguyen's answer, Balch wrote, is to bring constructive news into one's life — which aligned with his editor's instructions.
Balch began with Positive News itself, opening the week's What Went Right roundup. Thirty minutes later, he reported feeling perky. The roundup led him to reports on a European Union proposal to prohibit social media use by children under 13, the eradication of dog-transmitted rabies in Chile, a drug that extends life for breast cancer patients in the United Kingdom, and a reward program in Singapore designed to encourage reading.
A longer article on the so-called NEETs problem — young people not in education, employment or training — clarified for Balch the distinction between good news and constructive journalism. The piece, he wrote, did not claim the problem had vanished, nor did it catalog despair or assign blame to young people. Instead it asked what is being done and what appears to be working. Balch read about one-to-one support programs, charities that run confidence-building sessions, and a government grant that covers young people's salaries for six months. The problem remains, he noted, but he came away with a sense of what people are attempting and what might be learned from it.
Three surprises emerged over the weekend as Balch sought out more solutions-focused journalism. The first was how difficult genuinely constructive news is to find. He encountered material that amounted to paid-for public relations, which left him feeling cheated, and serious journalism that explored a solution but hedged it so heavily that he finished slightly deflated. He acknowledged that taking evidence seriously may inevitably produce such caveats, but found himself craving a story that simply showed an idea working.
The second surprise concerned human interest. Balch admitted to occasional boredom, which left him feeling guilty and confused. The solutions were interesting and potentially world-changing, yet he found himself swiping past them. The problem, he concluded, was not the solutions themselves but the dry or technical manner in which they were sometimes presented — abundant earnest problem-solving and insufficient people-centered storytelling.
The BBC podcast People Fixing the World, in Balch's assessment, strikes the right balance by placing people at the center of its stories. He cited episodes about French companies that open their offices to homeless people after hours, Basque students who build low-cost baby incubators, and an inventor who created a 999 app for people who cannot speak. These stories did more than make him feel good, he wrote; they made him want to know what happens next.
The third surprise was the sheer variety of constructive journalism. Once Balch began looking, he found an astonishing range of subjects, at times overwhelming, and caught himself thinking he had to consume all of it as though he had discovered a new information backlog. Gradually he relaxed and let curiosity guide him, just as he would with conventional news.
That approach led him to the NEETs piece, which he found particularly relevant as the father of two sixth-form-aged children, and to a Positive News article about attending a silent retreat — a subject that hit home given that his wife repeatedly suggests he spend less time listening to speech radio through his headphones. Another Positive News article, about an oil executive turned business-accountability campaigner, encouraged him for a different reason: perhaps those in middle age really can change their spots.
After 48 hours, Balch reported feeling definitely better, but he argued that feeling better is not quite the point. He did not conclude that bad news is simply bad and positive news straightforwardly good, nor does he wish to inhabit an information bubble that keeps difficult stories at a safe distance. Some of the most useful journalism he encountered during the experiment, he wrote, concerned serious, unresolved problems.
What changed, according to Balch, was the question he found himself asking. Rather than simply asking how bad something is, he increasingly asked what people are doing about it, what can be learned, and what he might do differently. He intends to continue reaching for radio news in the morning, but plans to be more deliberate about what he reaches for afterward. He added that he might even leave the meditation mat where he can see it.
