Looking on the Bright Side

BizReport.com: The news menu was stuffed with the dreadful and appalling yesterday. A massive hurricane bearing down on Texas. A bus fire killing 24 elderly people near Dallas. Floods ravaging New Orleans — again. And that was before you even considered what’s happening to the economy, or in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else in this sad, wicked world.
You see any happy news out there?
As it happens, the people who produce Happynews.com did. There it was, right at the top of their Web site, bordered by a sunny yellow frame and adorned with smiley faces: “Hurricane Rita still weakening.”
And: “Majority to back Algerian peace plan.”
And: “Indonesia takes steps to prevent bird flu.”
Happynews.com, started three months ago, covers many of the international, national, sports and entertainment stories that the big guys do. But as the name implies, it doesn’t cover them the same way. Happynews doesn’t do bummers: no death, no destruction, no shocking Lindsay Lohan weight-loss updates. Which is to say, it doesn’t do the kinds of stories that have come to define the contemporary concept of “news.”
Unlike the media’s bad news bearers, Happynews’s glass is always at least half-full, and sometimes it bubbles right over. It is Prozac for the eyes: “India proposes free school for one-girl families,” it declared brightly yesterday. A typical story from its international section might be “Food Aid to Niger Increases,” while its sports section includes the likes of “Long-distance swimmer conquers Great Lakes.”
Happynews.com, Where the Beat Is Always Up [BizReport.com]