Bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. The received wisdom about bad news being what the public wants goes back for as long as there have been newspapers. But that doesn’t make it the only game in town.
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Bad news is here to stay. The recent Assises du journalisme de Tours provided the opportunity for a Viavoice survey that found that a full seven out of ten French readers declared themselves to be very, or mostly interested in the faits divers – those typically short tales of shock and horror.
For many that will elicit the classic gallic shrug. Everyone knows that grisly briefs have always helped sell papers, even if they are looked down on by ‘proper’ journalists (the French slang term for faits divers translates roughly as ‘dog roadkill’).
What’s more thought provoking for news professionals is that six out of ten of those surveyed thought that these briefs ‘should be given higher priority’ than political, international, or economic news.
It should perhaps be noted that some of the more recent stories of the genre have gone way beyond grisly briefs and become national talking points; the Pélicot case being an obvious example.
That said, given the taste for faits divers, it’s interesting that those surveyed described their emotions as being ‘anger’, and ‘sadness’, just above ‘curiosity’, and ‘repulsion’.
So is that what sells? Is that what we, as an industry, need to turn to in order to avoid the constant menace of news avoidance?
Or is this a classic example of confirmation bias? “Dead dogs” have always played well with the public, so the dominance of the dead dog story is what you see reported in Le Figaro, CB News, Ouest-France, RFI, and dozens of others.
But ‘bad news sells’ isn’t the only story out there. It’s just the more commonly reported one.
Whisper it, but good news is also getting a look in.
The last few days has seen the launch of a newspaper in Quebec rejoicing in the name of Le Journal de Sainte-Foy, Sillery, Cap-Rouge et Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures and distinguishing itself by prioritising good news, being printed on paper, and being proudly hyper local. Let’s not get carried away; this is a modest enterprise, but with 40 adverts in its 48 page edition, with 62,500 copies printed, the editor, Jean-Luc Lavoie declares ad sales in the region of $40,000, with that expected to rise to $50,000 for March.
More importantly, the title is in discussion with existing papers about possibilities for collaboration.
Good news media aren’t new of course. The Good News Network debuted in 1997. France saw the launch of Le Media Positif in 2020. Last November readers of 20 Minutes in Switzerland would have found it musing that news publishers were betting on good news. If they took a look at their French counterparts they would find that 20 Minutes France already has its Actualité Positive.
This isn’t to say that good news has proved to be good news for everyone. The Guardian launched a good news newsletter called the Upside, but it seems to have melted away. Either that or there has been no good news for about six years.
At Upgrade Media the hyper local positivity of Le Journal de Sainte-Foy, Sillery, Cap-Rouge et Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures is more interesting than some AI reshuffled national good news, however. In very many ways it is the precise flip side of the coin of the dead dog stories that are dominating the news. Both faits divers and positive news merchants are courting emotions, whether of anger/sadness or joy. Both court curiosity, and both are very human. It’s hard not to see both as being alternatives to the mainstream news agenda which we know large numbers of people are increasingly avoiding. Perhaps we should be putting more effort into both dead dogs and daily delights, not least since that same study into French readers found not only the undiminishing appetite for bad news, but with it an appreciation of human reporting. In fact, surprisingly given the pressures on the press, it found that the appreciation of journalism itself had gone up over the last year.
Which is a little bit of good news for your day.
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