News site iG’s experiment quickly came undone when the Sept. 11 attacks unfolded in the U.S. The chapter sparked a lasting debate in Brazil on how journalism should treat positive news.
Twenty-five years ago, Leão Serva was driving to his office in São Paulo on a beautiful winter morning, ready for the launch of a new experiment. As the young news director of iG, then one of the most visited news websites in Brazil, he was at the forefront of the country’s emerging online news industry. That day, he and his colleagues were trying something different: publishing only positive news.
Simply called “Good News Day,” the idea was the brainchild of iG executives as a marketing strategy amid a torrent of negative news in the country, particularly an economic slowdown, rising consumer prices and a wave of kidnappings.
Reporters had been preparing stories for a month. One focused on a local man who projected movies from his rooftop, creating a neighborhood cinema. Another focused on a rehab facility for teenagers.
The day was Sept. 11, 2001. Editors had arbitrarily chosen the date for their new experiment, but unknown to Serva, more than 4,000 miles from São Paulo, the biggest terrorist attacks in the United States’ history were taking place.
Serva’s phone rang while he was still in traffic. From the iG newsroom, assistant editor Carina Martins told him a plane had crashed into a building in New York City.
He initially resisted changing his newsroom’s plans.
“Carina, today is Good News Day, you know that,” Serva replied. “You’re not going to call me with all the bad news, are you? Publish the bad news on the bad-news site. Today is Good News Day.”
Less than 20 minutes later, Martins called back with even more disturbing news: Another plane had crashed into the other World Trade Center tower.
Serva remembers Martins telling him: “It looks like terrorism. I’m going to put it in the headline. When you get here, fire me.”
Serva recalled how the day unfolded in his newsroom in his recently released book, “How to Protect Yourself From a Grenade.” In it, he gives a detailed account of how an experiment in promoting good news failed and became one of the biggest lessons in the recent history of Brazilian journalism.
Screenshot of IG's landing page on Oct 18th 2001. Source
Serva arrived at the iG newsroom, praised Martins for her news judgment and, after discussing the situation with the team, decided to abandon Good News Day. It was still morning. A pop-up message on the iG homepage read: “We tried to have a day with only good news. But it wasn’t possible. The story accelerated and ran us over.”
Good News Day lasted less than 12 hours.
“Since midnight the night before, we had been publishing good news. So until around 9:30 or 10 a.m., the site contained several good-news stories,” Serva told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “Then we suspended them and never published them again. They were simply forgotten at the back of a ‘digital drawer’ on iG’s computers.”
Novel ideas were not new to iG. The newsroom had already had a themed day called “No Gerunds Day,” when the outlet’s editorial team challenged itself to publish no stories with verbs in the gerund form, which in English end in “-ing.”
Cover of Leão Serva's Book "Como se proteger de uma granada"
But from the beginning of the Good News Day initiative, opinions around the newsroom were skeptical. Darlan Alvarenga, then a reporter for iG, put it bluntly.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks were “proof that you can’t fight the facts and fight what is news,” Alvarenga told LJR.
Other colleagues said other events that had happened on Sept. 10 — when a mayor from a big city in São Paulo state was fatally shot — were already showing the idea of devoting a day to cover positive news exclusively was unlikely to work.
“It probably wouldn’t have worked regardless of Sept. 11,” Francisco Itacarambi, a former iG reporter, told LJR. “Everyday life inevitably includes tragedies, unpopular government decisions, violence and economic crises. Journalism’s role is to tell that reality, not try to filter it out for 24 hours.”
Good News Day became a well known episode in Brazilian journalism. It was the subject of an episode of the popular Rádio Novelo Apresenta podcast and numerous stories in outlets including Folha de S.Paulo, Piauí and Nexo, as well as several blogs and even a short documentary
The experiment sparked many discussions, including the idea that news organizations need to find other ways to cover and pay attention to positive news.
Serva said he learned that good news rarely travels as quickly as bad news. Developments such as a decline in urban violence often go unnoticed, while individual acts of violence command attention. The result, he said, is a distorted picture of reality that can negatively shape public opinion. He believes it has contributed to drum up support for far-right parties around the world in recent years.
So while Good News Day may have been a bad idea, Serva said, the impulse behind it was not. Journalists should find ways to give positive developments the attention they deserve, he said.
“We need to understand that good news is news,” he said.
