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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
Is No News Good News?
The best part of my job as a journalist is that I come across so many interesting people. Sometimes because I interview them, sometimes because I commission stories from them, or because their work somehow ends up on my desk. Mark Boyle is one of them. You might have heard of him as ‘The Moneyless Man’: he started out living without money for a year and ended up doing it for three years. Needless to say it changed his life forever. He’s since given up not just news but all technologies that transmit news and social media. In his regular column for the Guardian, he writes about life against the status quo.
I was of course particularly interested in his reasons for quitting his media consumption altogether. In this article he explains how he did it and why. He made his decision in the pub, “where all good decisions get made” (his words not mine!).
“I didn’t like how reading the news made me feel as I ate my porridge. Terrorism! Scandal! Murder! Economic growth too slow! Corruption! Celebrity says something stupid! Downing Street press release says government is doing great work! The big bad world became even badder. I also felt that it distracted me from what was going on around me – my neighbours, the flora and fauna outside my front doorstep, the land under my feet”
At this point I need to add the disclaimer that I am a co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project, which advocates for a more solutions-focused approach to journalism, and I have also worked with Positive News, a magazine Boyle mentions in the piece.
Although I don’t agree with all of Boyle’s conclusions, his columns always make me think and force me to question many things I take for granted. Enough reason to highlight his work here.
