We respond to news that signals a threat, but what about news that suggests what to do about it?

The dominance of negative news is a testament to how relatively pleasant ordinary life is in Britain (for now)

Journalists are often accused of focusing on bad news. Looking at my own output since I joined The Independent in June, I can’t say it fills the heart with joy and hope.

Research has suggested that humans are hardwired to pay most attention to unusual or deviant things because they pose potential threats. So journalists – being human themselves – tend to favour such things in their news coverage, and our equally human readers are drawn to those headlines.

But for an event to be newsworthy, it doesn’t have to be bad. It does, however, have to be unusual or indicate some kind of change. For example, last week this newspaper reported that El Salvador had its first day without a murder for two years. This was obviously good news, and newsworthy because it was out of the ordinary.

In contrast, yet another lurch downwards in the value of the pound, although bad news for most of our readers, is no longer as interesting. The British currency has become similar to the British rain: it always reliably falls. The pound’s moves are now newsworthy only if they reach some kind of record, whether a new high or – more likely these days – a new low.

The risk of recession, something that has featured on business pages quite a lot recently, meets both of those criteria: it is bad but also, importantly, unusual. The government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, says recessions hit the UK roughly once a decade, so long, happy periods of economic growth are the normal state of affairs.

To some extent, the fact that our media are dominated by negative news is a testament to how relatively pleasant ordinary life is in Britain (for now). A cap on public sector pay rises makes headlines here, whereas in certain poorer countries meagre salaries are so often paid with a long delay that timely payments are almost more newsworthy.

Still, it is probably true for most newsrooms that “bad + unusual” packs more punch than “good + unusual” in a variation of the old journalistic adage: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

This bias has led to the emergence of an alternative approach – reporting focused not just on problems but also on solutions. It originated in the Nineties and is known as, funnily enough, solutions journalism or constructive journalism.

The approach has its critics too but the fact that it exists, and is backed up by a growing body of academic research, is a reminder that journalists can prosper by delivering more of the quirky stories that offer some clear positive value, alongside the regular diet of negative news that helps us to understand the dangers to our lives.

Yours,

Olesya Dmitracova

Economics and business editor