The Bright Side Lab: How to turn teens (back) onto the news without getting them down

Published in

Journalism Innovation

11 min readFeb 15, 2023

Man on phone on banks of Shire river, Malawi.

“When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best
And
Always look on the bright side of life
Always look on the light side of life”
- Song from Life of Brian by Eric Idle

I have a dirty secret. I’m a journalist who doesn’t follow the news as much anymore. Lots of ordinary folk are switching off, too, especially younger people. As a parent and a lifelong news addict, I’m worried about the impact my profession is having on mental health.

Many journalists express the same concerns (at least in private). That’s why I am on a mission to promote journalism for young people that focuses on solutions rather than problems: the Bright Side. I want my sons, and the rest of their generation, to believe humanity has a future on earth, and to want to help make that future brighter.

Switching off isn’t the only answer

My father infected me with his love of the news, constantly shouting at the radio. I couldn’t believe my luck when I got a job at Reuters after graduating. I was paid to do something that often felt more like a hobby. I traveled the world as a foreign correspondent, and then a bureau chief, eventually settling in Berlin.

After two decades of churning out headlines, the job gradually started to feel more like a chore. I rarely missed a day in the office, but I stopped watching the TV news at home, which back then was full of pictures of Syrians escaping from civil war. I thought colleagues would think I was being a bad citizen, and a bad journalist, so I kept my selective news avoidance to myself.

But I became increasingly concerned about the impact that covering the news was having on my colleagues, so I got involved in an initiative to support Reuters journalists dealing with stress and trauma. It wasn’t just war correspondents who were suffering. Many colleagues were burning out. But it was only when my environmentalist son suffered a panic attack that I started to think about the impact news has on consumers too. Even though I turned off the radio when Brexit and Donald Trump were in the headlines to protect myself and my kids, my son could not avoid anxiety about climate change at school. That’s when I started to question whether switching off was the only way to deal with the gloom.

Two books showed me another way

1. The first was Factfulness by Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling. Rosling argues that most people think the world is poorer, more dangerous and less healthy than it really is. Rosling has his critics, who accuse him of a selective use of statistics that paint too rosy a picture of human progress. But his perspective made me feel better and less inclined to crawl back under the bedcovers. My son read it too and I am sure it contributed to his recovery.

2. The second was Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Among other things, it explains the tricks our minds play to make us assume the worst. Journalists and algorithms often exploit these tricks to keep readers doom scrolling. It doesn’t have to be that way. Around the same time, I first heard about the idea of constructive journalism — media that is more focused on finding solutions than on attributing blame. At one such outlet, Dutch site De Correspondent, they had a “progress reporter.” I wanted that position.

Source: https://constructiveinstitute.org/

But my job at Reuters was forcing me ever closer to the (negative) news. During the pandemic, I became a professional doom-scroller, monitoring Twitter, emails and other feeds for breaking news. I suggested that we should report declining COVID cases as well as new spikes of infection. But colleagues often sneered at any upbeat angles I wanted to pursue. It is true that readers are more likely to click on an alarmist headline, but, perhaps surprisingly, they are more likely to pay for news that makes them feel optimistic. And solution-framed stories have been shown to make people want to take positive action.

Journalists often confuse “critical” thinking with a compulsion to be critical, focus on the negative and find fault. One thing was clear: I wanted to stop doom-scrolling. So I left Reuters in 2022. I wasn’t even sure I still wanted to be a journalist. But I have since realised there is a different kind of journalism that I want to be part of. Indeed, for our profession to survive, and contribute to healthy democracies, we need to do more than just focus on death, corruption and pessimism. We must inform, but we should also entertain and inspire, particularly for the sake of the next generation.

“Despair is even an indulgence if you look at the power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone.”
- Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Darkness

Many young people feel a sense of despair, particularly since the pandemic, but few of them see politics as a privilege that belongs to them. The torrent of negative news makes them question whether they have any power. So, I decided to promote constructive journalism for 12 to 20-year-olds. If a more optimistic view of the world could help my son, then it should be good for other young people too. I applied to the CUNY Newmark J-School’s 100-day program for Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators to supercharge my idea.

Young people are losing hope:

Of 50 teenagers in Berlin and London, who I asked about the state of the world, only one included a single, unequivocally positive word: “innovative.” However, that person also sees the world as “tumultuous and difficult.” Other answers included: “Chaos, Overwhelming and Scary,” “Very, very bad,” and “A disastrous mess.”
That chimes with the views of young people across the world. Almost half of Gen Z is pessimistic about the future, according to a survey in 20 countries by research agency Glocalities.
40% of young people avoid the news, up 10 points in five years, according to the Reuters Institute.
And they show much less interest in politics than their parents, at least in the rich world. However, on the bright side, they are much more likely to be prepared to volunteer, the Glocalities survey shows.

How to engage young people?

Craft: https://wearecraft.agency/the-kaleidoscope

These are my top 3 takeaways from the CUNY program:

Journalism as a service: Many journalists prefer to broadcast what they think is important, rather than considering what audiences might want or need. “We don’t write what the audience wants, we write what ‘needs’ to be written, but if nobody is listening, you are doing it just for yourself,” said Erika Marzano, an expert in social media and audience development at German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle. CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis agrees: “Journalism is performing a service for a community rather than creating content.” I had always assumed that being well informed is a moral duty and that quality journalism is important for democracy. But those are not necessarily good arguments to motivate young people to engage with news. To do that, we need to think about what the “job” is that journalism is doing for the audience…. And for many young people, entertainment is just as important as information.
THE news vs news: Many journalists equate THE news with their areas of interest: politics, economics, conflict, crime. Konrad Collao, a media research expert, notes that it is precisely this narrow type of news that young people are avoiding. We forget at our peril that lots of other subjects are newsworthy and of interest to potential readers. Teenagers I surveyed in Berlin and London said they would engage with the news more if it was relevant to their lives. They want to hear less about politicians shaking hands, and more about when their school building will be renovated.
Who’s afraid of TikTok?: Like most parents, I am worried about the amount of time my sons spend online and about the toxic content and interactions they are exposed to. But many of us condemn these apps without even visiting the digital environment our children are inhabiting. In fact, that was one of the clear messages from my survey of teenagers: they want the older generation to understand both the positives and the negatives of social media, and they want more guidance on how to navigate it. One student said this: “Social media is not an altogether terrible thing. It can also be a tool to receive news, spread messages etc. Many parents vilify social media but it’s much more complex than that.”

Initially, I thought I was too old to show my own face online. So, I tried animating some Sketch notes, but I only got a few hundred views. Eventually I realised you don’t need to do silly dances to succeed on TikTok, but you do need to tune into the style of the platform. “This stuff is attitudinal. It is not about AGE. It is a mindset,” according to VICE journalist Sophia Smith Galer, who has more than 460,000 followers on TikTok.

Persuaded by the CUNY ethos of “learning out loud,” I finally plucked up courage to make a TikTok video, with the help of a 12-year-old consultant. I decided to ask questions posed by this project linked to the Factfulness book to see how they would resonate.

Amazingly, my first 30-second video attracted more than 8,000 views and dozens of likes. The TikTok environment seemed more supportive of my rather amateur efforts than online spaces I am used to like Twitter. I am now more comfortable engaging with these platforms. But I don’t want to become an influencer myself: it is a demanding job given that algorithms only promote creators who churn out daily content, and it is very difficult to make money, of course.

The Bright Side Lab: testing a new kind of upbeat news literacy

Instead of generating more content myself, I decided during the CUNY program to focus on helping young people navigate the media landscape and learn journalism skills. So, I have pivoted my project to target schools. I want to teach teenagers about solutions journalism, cognitive bias and citizen journalism so they can produce their own constructive stories.

Most news literacy projects take a negative slant, focusing on misinformation and disinformation. While this is important, these courses risk stoking mistrust of the media and politics. One student told me: “People will often assume that teenagers are very easily manipulated and aren’t actually able to take part in a political debate.” In fact, teenagers are usually streets ahead in knowing how to use online tools and AI to play around with content. What they are lacking is a sense they can make a difference themselves. Screens promote anxious passivity.

News literacy class at Berlin Bilingual School, January 2023.

At one Berlin school, I set the students a challenge: Think about a problem in their lives and come up with a possible solution to it. They had no difficulty thinking about problems, ranging from complaints about school lunches, to concerns about the curriculum, to a desire for better origin labelling for supermarket food. But they found it much harder to come up with solutions, and particularly to think about how they might be able to have a personal impact on making change happen. This feeling of a lack of control is fuelling an epidemic of self-harm and eating disorders. “We feel helpless! (impending doom),” one of them said in my survey.

What are teenagers are watching instead of the news?

It’s not surprising that many teenagers are self-soothing online with cat memes, gaming, comedy and people being kind. MrBeast was the highest paid YouTuber of 2021, earning $54 million with videos featuring expensive stunts and cash giveaways to the needy. My hunch is that if teenagers could find more inspiring content about people solving real problems, particularly in their local communities, the news industry might be able to win them back. The students told me they wanted more discussions in class about news and stories that are more applicable to their lives. They also want to know about ways they can help or things they can change themselves. They want to act, but often don’t know how. At CUNY, we learned how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be applied to news. While it might be easy for journalism to provide information relevant to our basic needs, it demands a new way of thinking to help our readers be able to do something about the situations we are reporting on.

Source: https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

What’s next for Bright Side Labs?

Ultimately, I want to show teenagers how to find (and create) stories of good people doing good things and hopefully inspire them to do something positive themselves. As a leadership coach, I use visualisation techniques to help clients imagine and realise alternative futures. Athletes do the same, so they are more likely to win. Constructive journalism is based on similar psychology: if we see examples of things going well, we are more likely to try to replicate them rather than assuming — and inviting — the worst.

I want to collaborate with news literacy and solutions journalism organisations and find funding to take this further. Here are my next plans:

An online course on YouTube on how to have a healthier news diet
A school workshop concept to teach constructive journalism skills
A newsletter for parents/educators about news literacy and/or teen mental health

Teenagers teach too

When I am nagging my sons to do their chores or get off their phones, I sometimes forget how proud they make me. They are much more able to articulate their emotional needs than boys a generation ago, they are alert to racism and sexism, and they are pretty good at cooking too! We often condemn young people for wasting their lives online, but social media is also helping spread progressive values around the world (even if misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate are fighting a rear-guard action).

Our generation is not setting the best example: many of us confuse being politically informed with being politically active. We rail against those in power, but don’t do much beyond voting every few years. Meanwhile, young people are taking to the streets, speaking openly about mental health challenges, and demanding a more equal society.

Students told me they are inspired by good citizens, young activists like Greta Thunberg, scientists, artists and athletes. I want to help them find stories like these that fill them with hope, but I also want them to have fun. Many young people are on a crushing self-improvement trip: they want to get good grades, make money, look perfect on Instagram AND do something meaningful with their lives. “We are the generation that is still expected to follow old values (eg careers) on the one hand, and is also told to save the world. It’s a lot of pressure,” one teenager told me. I recently read this article: Modern teens are healthy squares. Teenagers are drinking, smoking, partying, and having sex much less than a generation ago. As a parent, this means less worry, of course. But on further reflection, I don’t want my kids to put so much pressure on themselves that they miss out on joy.

So I end with an appeal: Let’s create news, and media literacy, for young people that is informative, inspiring and fun.

Please contact me if you want to help me realise this vision.