Website reports only good news for a day, loses two thirds of its readers

Headlines included 'No disruption on the roads despite snow'

(YouTube)

It's well known that newspapers tend to focus on bad news, all 'Smoked salmon will give you cancer' and 'Escaped Ferris wheel kills 500', but one Russian news website decided to find out just how unpopular good news stories are once and for all.

The City Reporter, based in Rostov-on-Don, tried to find positives in everything for an entire day on 1 December, or else didn't dwell on the negatives, leading with headlines like 'No disruption on the roads despite snow'.

"Do you feel like you are surrounded by negative information? You don't want to read the news in the morning?" the website asked readers."Do you think good news is a myth? We'll try to prove the opposite tomorrow!"

The result? According to deputy editor Viktoriya Nekrasova, traffic dropped by two-thirds.

"We looked for positives in the day's news, and we think we found them," she wrote on Facebook. "But it looks like almost nobody needs them. That's the trouble."

According to the BBC, the City Reporter went back to gloomy staple stories the next day, reporting on car crashes and burst water pipes.

In spite of the website's findings, the rise of the internet generally seems to have increased demand for feel-good stories, as evidenced by the proliferation of headlines like these.