I usually like to send you things from my toolkit to give you a boost, but I’m making an exception today. I’m giving Arianna Huffington a standing ovation for promoting the good news story!

I had a mentor at university who was employed by the United Nations to start a Good News story initiative in 1997. The mission was to provide a computer and skill up a moderator to engage with a community and write stories of what was working. These communities (towns) had experienced a civil war and were re-building. This project enabled them to communicate their wins and to start to balance all the negative they had experienced, with some good.

This got me thinking about how the positive story fuels positivity, creativity, problem solving and action.

Arianna commented in her blog post What’s working: All the news that's fit to print:

“As journalists, our job is to give our audience an accurate picture -- and that means the full picture -- of what's going on in the world. Just showing tragedy, violence, mayhem -- focusing on what's broken and what's not working -- misses too much of what is happening all around us. What about how people are responding to these challenges, how they're coming together, even in the midst of violence, poverty and loss? And what about all the other stories of innovation, creativity, ingenuity, compassion and grace? If we in the media only show the dark side, we're failing at our jobs.

And, what's more, it turns out that we are also failing to give our readers and viewers what they want.”