As an ICRC delegate, Isabelle Bourgeois was sent in the hottest planet conflict areas: Kosovo, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq… Challenging years, from which she has kept good memories though:
“In my humanitarian missions, she says, I have seen many more waves of solidarity and generosity than isolated barbaric acts, however widely relayed by the press on all channels!”
As if the media deliberately “forget” all these hope-filled gestures.
“When turning on the TV in the evening, after a day of 14 hours in the heart of the conflicts, she adds, there was nothing I recognized from what I lived on the spot in the news reports! Why, for example, hasn’t anyone ever spoken about those Iraqis who, at the peril of their lives, moved unexploded shells to repair a water line?”
When she returned to Switzerland in 2003, Isabelle rebooted her career as a journalist to try to reverse the trend. Beside her work as the chief-editor of the ICRC internal magazine, she created a blog, www.planetpositive.org, exclusively dedicated to positive information.
She is not the only one: everywhere, in Europe and in the United States, media specialized in “constructive journalism” are emerging. This booming trend dismisses any notion of naïve optimism. It is not a question of denying the injustices and disasters ravaging our planet, but to focus on everything that can contribute to resolve them. The oceans are infested with plastic bottles? A gifted Dutchman, Boyan Slat, 19 years old, found how to get rid of these wastes. Thousands of American households are saddled with debts? A group of activists, the “Rolling Jubilee Fund” uses crowdfunding system to assist them – until then, they have written off the equivalent of 14.7 million dollars of debts…
But this type of media find its audience? According to a well-known journalist saying, only bad news sell. But, by constantly depicting the world in black, the mainstream media may have ended up boring their public. According to Sean Wood, editor-in-chief of the English solution-focused quarterly magazine “Positive News”, this behaviour is counterproductive:
“I am astounded by the amount of times when people say to me “I’ve turned off the news from my life completely precisely because it’s too negative or depressing” Journalists are trying to serve the society by exposing all the problems, but their treatment is so negative that they eventually give people a sense of powerlessness and turn them away from the news. Reporters end up shooting themselves in the foot.”
Meanwhile, the title “Positive News” escapes the press crisis with a steady circulation of 25.000 copies. A unique phenomenon in the media industry, the title is distributed in England by volunteers, readers who are so attached to the newspaper that they order each issue by tens and distribute them in their village stores.
“When you are an independent publisher, I believe you have a much more engagement in terms of readers, says Valentina Marchioni, journalist for the Italian solution-focused title “BuoneNotizie”.
On our side, we have launched the “ambassadors of good news” program, where we invite our readers to tell us about all the initiatives that work in their environment.”
For the moment, the BuoneNotizie site has 50.000 monthly visitors, but the recent launch of a smartphone and tablet application should increase its audience.
The mainstream media are beginning to follow. On June 22, 2013, 22 major press titles (including Le Monde, Times of India, El Watan…) participated in the “Impact Journalism Day”, a global event dedicated to solution-focused information, organized by the Sparknews site. Within 24 hours, media partners have published simultaneously solution-focused articles, globally read by almost 50 million readers. The second edition is scheduled for September 20.
Gilles Vanderpooten, who runs the French association “Reporters d’Espoirs”, confirms this trend:
“A few years ago, he says, the editors-in-chief of the headlines were skeptical. Today, 95% of the journalists understand what we do and adhere to the movement.”
As a result, the association became the partner of major media during special editions: TF1 for one week per year, L’Express for a special edition or Libération, for the “Libé des Solutions”. With sales that jump by 20%, this special edition of Libé has the highest annual score of the newspaper!
And if constructive information was the future of journalism? A phenomenon that allows both to put an end to the press crisis and – finally – to see the glass half full?