Casey Lartigue Jr. is co-founder of Freedom Speakers International, a Seoul Honorary Citizen, and co-author of Greenlight to Freedom.
Bad news about good news
Freedom Speakers International co-founders Casey Lartigue and Lee Eun-koo pose during an interview at the organization's headquarters in Seoul, Sept. 26. Courtesy of Andrew Corbley
By Casey Lartigue Jr.
In late 2014, a Russian newspaper allegedly decided to try something radical. For one day, it published only good news. There were no reports of corruption, no accidents, no political outrage, only positive stories about community projects and small victories in daily life.
By the next morning, two-thirds of its readers reportedly had vanished. The editors quickly reverted to the usual diet of disasters, scandals, and misfortune. That allegedly proved what many editors already suspected: people say they want optimism, but they click on catastrophe.
According to Quartz, the publication was a Russian news site called City Reporter. The story has been repeated across journalism conferences, university lectures, and countless opinion columns as proof that positivity simply doesn’t sell.
What is the attraction to bad news? A study published in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed more than 100,000 headlines and millions of clicks. The researchers found that each additional negative word in a headline increased the likelihood of someone clicking by 2.3 percent. Positive words, on the other hand, made people less likely to click. The conclusion was clear: negativity drives engagement.
Social media has made outrage profitable, as fear spreads faster than empathy, anger drives engagement, calm is ignored, and algorithms reward bad news while silencing nuance.
I see this pattern regularly in my work at Freedom Speakers International, where North Korean refugees learn English and develop confidence through public speaking. Their stories are about recovery, courage, and the steady process of change, but those qualities do not translate into clicks.
During the Korean Chuseok holiday, the South Korean outlet News1 ran a two-part video feature about Han Song-mi, co-author with me of her memoir “Greenlight to Freedom.” She mentioned me at the 10-minute mark, though she told me later that editors deleted the part where she called me her hero. Korean editors seem to have developed a personal grudge against me.
North Korean refugee Han Song-mi and co-author Casey Lartigue pose during an interview by the Good News Network, Sept. 26. Courtesy of Andrew Corbley
As usual, the view count for North Korean refugee stories is modest compared to the global parade of doom and destruction. Her two videos currently have almost 80,000 combined views and 175 comments. Her views paled in comparison to the doom and destruction of other videos that had been released.
The Russian newspaper allegedly learned its lesson in one day. And yet, some people persist in telling good news anyway.
The Good News Network ran a detailed feature about Freedom Speakers International. Founded in 1997 by Geri Weis-Corbley, a former television news editor, the Good News Network has published positive stories for nearly three decades. It began as a one-woman response to media negativity long before “clickbait” became a word. Today, it continues with roughly 590,000 followers on Facebook.
That longevity alone is astonishing. In the years since GNN launched, countless louder, flashier platforms have risen and collapsed. The fact that a site dedicated to constructive stories still exists is evidence that decency can survive online, even if it does not dominate the algorithm. Yes, it is remarkable, but this is also probably the first time you have heard of that outlet.
Freedom Speakers International has now been featured not only by the Good News Network but also by Good News Internet TV and the Good News newspaper in Korea. I am not sure if they are connected, but they seem to share the same rare instinct: to look for what is working rather than what is breaking.
And there are others trying to do the same. Positive News, based in the United Kingdom, CBS has created short segments such as “The Uplift,” the Reuters Institute has studied similar local projects where editors compile what they call “good ideas” rather than bad headlines.
The Russian newspaper that allegedly tried good news for a day reversed itself quickly. The ironic part is that it was bad news about good news that made the story attractive to readers and to have it re-told many times.