More and more people are tuning the news out: 'Now I don't have that anxiety

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Fix the News yet (https://fixthenews.com/). If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter!

For example, did you know that in July 2025, 99.7% of new power capacity added in the US was from clean power (led by Texas)? The EU, US, and UK have committed to a $125 billion global fund to protect the Amazon? The US prison population is the lowest it's been since 1992? A new therapy has successfully cleared 100% of metastatic cancers in trial patients? 1 in 8 kids in Botswana were born with HIV in 2001, but that number has dropped to 1 in 100?

These headlines rarely make the mainstream, but they're the ones that bring me the most hope and joy. If you're looking for positive news, you will love Fix the News.

That's pretty neat. It sounds like a better version of Mark's idea from Peep Show:

Nancy: Bad news, bad news, bad news. Jesus, Jeremy, one bus crash. What about all the buses that made it safely to their destinations, huh?

Jeremy: Yeah! Yeah, this is such bullshit.

Mark: Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except of course, it would take forever!

I can hear their voices in my head while reading that. Especially how Mark says "forever".

> If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter!

I'm surprised you just don't get it. People are sick of "amazing news".

I kinda miss bus plunge filler.

The problem with this kind of initiative is that people don't agree on what positive news means. Your selection is very ideologically slanted. People on the right could interpret these news stories as negative. For example:

1. 99.7% of power capacity coming from "clean power" can be interpreted by people on the right as the grid getting more expensive and less reliable in order to solve a climate problem they don't think is real.

2. Countries committing to a global fund to protect the Amazon can be interpreted as using money critically needed at home to bribe South Americans into doing what they should already be doing themselves. If the people who actually live next to it don't care enough to protect it themselves then why should random people in Iowa or Ireland be forced to?

3. The US prison population being low is only a positive if crime is low. If people don't feel safe, then it can be interpreted as a result of not locking enough people up, and positive news would be hearing that the prison population is going up. This claim may not feel positive if you just saw the video of the murder of the Ukrainian lady on US public transport by a known-dangerous dude who just randomly stabbed her from behind for no reason.

A news feed that is only positive news for a conservative would obviously look very different to such a feed designed for liberals.

It think these "positive news" approaches are always falling prey to stated vs. revealed preference. People's revealed preference is that they want news about _actual_ events, which is why these positive news approaches always stay niche.

People stated reason for not liking news is the stress, attributing this to the negativity of the news. I think a larger issue is the frequency and transience of the updates, leading to oscillations in peoples understand of situations (similar to the car dealership example in the "Thinking in Systems" book).

Modern news networks are always pushing shallow views of new events (i.e. "BREAKING"). Unless someone explicitly follows up on a story, they were only exposed to the crisis and not the resolution of it. I'd love a network that was "yesterdays news" which waited to publish any news until a broader picture of the situation was understood.

> The problem with this kind of initiative is that people don't agree on what positive news means.

A newsletter is problematic if it doesn't cater equally to people who believe that climate change is a hoax? Seriously?

What do people want, in that case.

Nope, even conservatives find leftist causes more moral: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-finds-leftis...

It's easy even for children and many animals to understand the Golden Rule: treat others like you'd want to be treated. It generally takes an adult to fail to understand it.

To live in less interesting times?

Surprised? An email subscription box with almost zero information, no example publication or past issues for perusal, unknown subscription or payment model, multiple multi-page privacy policies... I'm surprised any of the target audience of people burned out by the shit that most media has become would assume it is legit and not going to burn you in some way.

I can definitely agree with that. Can't wait for the day where the biggest drama isn't yet another constitutional crisis.

This! I also wish the news would be charged to follow up on their lead stories. It's interesting to read that the US wants to sell TikTok but as soon as it leaves the headlines you have to actively search for any updates - and you're lucky if there are any.

This kind of reporting (breaking, tickers) generates more stress than any understanding and never enables you to form a more complete picture.

Subscribe to a periodical. I got a bit too busy recently but for two years I subscribed to Private Eye (if you're not from the UK you might need to find an alternative) it's fortnightly and they don't put much on their website. They follow up on stories sometimes going back to the 80s or more.

If you close the subscription modal almost all of their content is available. This is a good example of their content: https://fixthenews.com/p/ftn-309-colours-of-the-moon-wash

You should read Postman's Technopoly. He critiques "context-free" news as leading to a confused viewership and argues that it's an unexpected consequence of modern news media: trying to give the viewer a fully-coherent understanding of current news simply wouldn't play as well as shallow, quick stories.

This creates a skewed information-action ratio, where people are inundated with information about problems they have no power to influence. Consequently, news is reduced to a form of trivia, and the act of being "informed" becomes a passive— and ultimately meaningless— ritual.

This points to a Substack UI/UX problem.

If a first time visitor to Substack doesn't know this, it's a bad experience.