Since we are currently in the biggest war in Europe since WW2 and in a tough economic situation, this is not a surprise that a lot of people aren’t excited to tune into news. One of the ways media managers are considering to counter news avoidance is giving readers the option to consume positive news stories.

The Fix looked into the trend and interviewed the editor-in-chief of ShoTam, a Ukrainian outlet that produces positive news even amidst the all-out war in their country.

News avoidance – and ways to counter it

According to a report published by the Reuters Institute in January, 72% of publishers from five dozen countries are concerned about a trend of readers actively avoiding news. Digital News Report data show that this selective avoidance has doubled in some countries since 2017, and there are several reasons behind that: many people feel that media coverage is overly negative, repetitive, hard to trust, and leaves them feeling powerless.

Newsroom leaders seem to understand that, and they overwhelmingly believe in explanatory journalism and Q&A formats as solutions. There are other, less popular but growing options– including solutions journalism, slow journalism, and positive news.

*A report published by the Reuters Institute in January* *2023*

Although positive news lags behind other ways to counter news fatigue identified by media managers (48% of respondents consider it an important approach, compared to 94% for explanatory journalism), the report’s author Nic Newman predicts that “publishers will be integrating features that allow people to see more (or less) positive news”.

Last year, the British LGBTQ+ outlet Pink News included a button “Uplifting Stories only” as a personalisation option. Chief product officer Sarah Watson told Press Gazette that around 25% of people in a recent reader survey expressed interest in being able to come to the website specifically to read positive stories.

Outlets devoted to inspiring news include Optimist Daily, The Good News Network, and Positive News. Newman also mentions independent creators, providing an example of sustainability scientist Alaina Wood with more than 320,000 subscribers on her TikTok known for posting positive climate news videos.

One of the trailblazers, though, has been the Ukrainian outlet ShoTam founded over five years ago.

How ShoTam was launched

The Ukrainian positive news outlet ShoTam (“How is it going?” in Ukrainian) was founded in 2017 by three journalists who moved to Kyiv from the occupied territories in Ukraine’s east. Editor-in-chief Serhii Kolesnikov explains that it started with a team of like-minded people who thought media content was overloaded with negative news. They wanted to believe that “it is not all that bad in the country,” which is how the idea was born.

*Serhii Kolesnikov, editor-in-chief of ShoTam (courtesy of Serhii Kolesnikov)*

Journalists started with a Facebook page where they experimented with positive examples of how society is changing or how the reforms are going. Kolesnikov points out that in 2017 structural reforms in decentralisation and medicine started, while some other projects were either in consideration or already done.

“We saw that stories about ordinary people got the most response. For example, when people in a village have organised separate waste collection independently, without the district centre’s help. Or stories of volunteers who open nursing homes for the elderly at the expense of benefactors, and so on,” shares Kolesnikov.

The team started doing such stories in a short video format with captions, which went viral with hundreds of thousands of views. Later, they got an offer from a fund to sponsor growth and expansion and accepted it. In 2023, ShoTam has a website and accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, and YouTube, with over 500,000 subscribers collectively.

According to website analytics data shared by Kolesnikov, 5.3 mln people visited ShoTam in 2022, with 60% of users coming to the website directly. As for video content, the central part of the brand, it gathers about 35-45 mln views monthly, but the editor-in-chief says that in December 2022 they broke a record with nearly 90 mln views.

An assortment of the latest video stories on ShoTam’s website. Headlines include “In [Western Ukraine region] Prykarpattia, a workshop for sewing underwear for the Armed Forces is opened” and “Which Ukrainian innovations conquered the world?” (Photo: shotam.info)

Obstacles: from scepticism of the idea to money

However, it wasn’t all that easy. One of the main problems they faced was a lack of specialists willing to work on positive news. “Journalists with experience were very sceptical of the idea. Many people were convinced that bad news is the best traffic generator. Many people still believe that. No one wanted to work for us, and we could not offer competitive salaries,” says Serhii Kolesnikov.

The team solved that issue by hiring non-journalists excited about the idea. Five years in, ShoTam has 24 employees working in several departments: the production unit responsible for video content, the website team working on text formats, the animation division for video, project production for special projects and the grants team. There is no SMM department because social media specialists work separately in different departments of the outlet.

Financial sustainability was another big issue from the beginning. ShoTam had only one sponsor for a few years – “Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative”, a US government-funded project promoting reforms in Ukraine – until it decided to cease funding, prompting the team to start building a more sustainable system.

ShoTam ended up with three primary income sources: grant projects, commercial projects, and membership. Before the war, the balance between these incomes was about 30/30/30. Now, membership makes up only about 4% of the income, and grants are the main source – both because membership revenue dropped and because grants revenue increased.

Kolesnikov says the number of members decreased from about 740 to 380 last year. He explains that many people lost their income, and small-town residents were hurt the most — and they are an essential part of ShoTam’s audience.

Still, people supported ShoTam unconditionally: the team experimented with benefits, asked the members, and realised they didn’t want any. “We also had patrons from the IT [sector] who covered a fairly large share of the budget, about 10% of the annual budget, and at the same time did not ask for anything in return. It was a pure donation; we do not even know some of them by name,” the editor-in-chief tells The Fix.

How to find positive news

“I don’t understand how you can’t find [positive news],” replies Kolesnikov. He says that positive things happen around us all the time. ShoTam often finds news through social media and regional outlets. Local publishers often report positive news stories but without proper development of the story. For example, a factory opens in a small city, and the local media only publishes a short news story about that. “But we are super excited about it; we collect the information, call this factory, expand the material, and here you go,” Kolesnikov says.

The outlet has a special section dedicated to small businesses, which it supports for free by publishing success stories about their work, showing the entrepreneurs’ personalities. It is especially relevant during the full-scale war when thousands of businesses evacuated to non-occupied parts of Ukraine.

ShoTam has a rule of not talking about politics: there is a taboo on mentioning the names of politicians at the central and local levels. “In other words, we have no dirt at all, no politics, no crime, nothing like that,” says the editor-in-chief.

There are some critics of this approach in the media industry, believing that the audience of such outlets gets a manipulative picture of the world. Kolesnikov replies that ShoTam is a niche outlet with a specific focus, balanced by the social media feeds and other outlets’ content. He shares a metaphor from the discussion with media analyst Brian Morrisey: “When you come to an eco-shop, you don’t expect the same assortment as in a supermarket, right?”

Working during the war

Serhii Kolesnikov says that the team was in shock during the full-scale invasion’s first days. It took some time (and two strikes on Facebook) to adapt. ShoTam tells the stories of volunteers from different countries helping the Ukrainians and stories of internally displaced persons (IDPs), predominantly from the majority-Russian-speaking and Orthodox east, who relocated to the Ukrainian-speaking Catholic west.

The team even launched a special project about IDPs and their success stories of integrating into new communities. The same goes for evacuated businesses, which helps the businesses bring new customers: locals come purposefully to support them.

Another war topic is society: how it changes and improves. A very popular subtopic are reforms of rural settlement communities and how they adapted to wartime, how they hosted hundreds of refugees and helped them find jobs, homes, and medical and education services.

“It’s hard to write positive news if you’ve been looking for the negative ones your whole life and all your previous professional experience tells you that you have to look for black spots on a white suit. It’s very difficult. So I can advise you to change your mindset if you want to work on positive news,” Kolesnikov says.

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Ukrainian outlet ShoTam publishes only positive news. Can this model be the answer to news avoidance?