Shall We Start with the Good News? · Global Voices
Solana Larsen

They say every cloud has a silver lining. Photo by Matthew Perkins on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Here's the good news: Throughout the years, Global Voices has brought you countless stories of human hope, bravery and creativity from all over the world. And here's the bad: Like other news sites, we're often guilty of focusing on negatives and perhaps even of depressing you.
Do you look forward to reading Global Voices? Or are you put off by the seemingly endless stream of stories of injustice and human suffering? In 2014 we're planning on pursuing more solution driven journalism, and hopefully showing more light and humanity than darkness and despair.
This does not mean we will ignore the bad things, like violence or poverty. But we do want to highlight more positive developments. In fact we’ve already started doing it, by posting stories about good news you never heard from Yemen, or millions of children in Bangladesh receiving free textbooks, or how Angolans use the internet to preserve their languages.
So many of our stories are centered on online social movements and citizens mobilizing to improve their societies. We want to tell this news in a way that inspires hope, rather than falling back on the more negative framing of regular mainstream news media.
For starters, we've created a new Good News category on Global Voices.
At the end of December, we hosted a conversation on GV Face about this idea between our co-founder Ethan Zuckerman, our deputy editor, Sahar H. Ghazi, advocacy editor, Ellery Biddle, and myself. It's going to be a long term effort to gradually change the way we tell stories together with our authors and editors.
We're following the lead of many other websites and news organizations who are pioneering this type of reporting under the headings like positive news, solutions-driven journalism, constructive reporting, and similar. Even the Huffington Post has a Good News section (though you'll probably find more cute pet stories there than you ever will on Global Voices).
The world we want you to experience on Global Voices is beautiful. It's inhabited by brave and creative individuals who believe in making the world a better place. Maybe we can even give our readers a sense that there's something they can do to help too.
Take a look at our Good News and let us know what else you’d like to see on Global Voices.