What's The Good News? - Showcase Project

What is What's The Good News? What's The Good News? is a positive and uplifting news stories aggregator. It collects and displays the most positive news stories so they hopefully receive more exposure, thus ever so slightly tilting the balance of the news cycle to be just that bit more positive. How does it work? v1 worked by pulling in news sources from all the major news outlets and running sentinent analysis on them to only display stories that passed over a certain sentiment score. Unfortunately, that didn't work. So v2 switched to a more human approach. It works by displaying a combination of user submitted stories and news pulled in from the Reddit API. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a start! Why did I create this? The news cycle has a negativity bias. The nature of the news cycle, with its heavy focus on negative events, leads us to believe that the world is getting worse. Statistically, however, it’s actually getting better. If you watch the news everyday you probably wouldn't know this. The media largely focuses on events happening right now rather than slow but transformative events happening over time. The news is about things that happen, not the things that don't happen. Studies have shown that consumers of negative news become more fatalistic, saying things such as "Why should I bother voting? It won't change anything?" or "I'm not giving that charity my money. They just keep it for themselves.". I believe it's in our best interest to reduce exposure to negative news. So that's why I decided to create What's The Good News?