CEO of Só Notícia Boa, Rinaldo de Oliveira created the first website dedicated exclusively to positive news. In an interview with the newsletter Um Grau e Meio, the journalist highlights the benefits of sharing good news with society.
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Where did the idea of creating a website with only good news come from?
I worked for a long time in radio and television in the mainstream press, reporting bad news. One day I had a stomach problem: I went to the doctor with severe pain. We discovered together that the newspaper I was presenting, which gave a lot of tragic news, was doing me harm.
The other part of the story came with my daughter, when I discovered that she didn’t watch me on television because she was afraid to watch my news. She told me: “Daddy, your program only shows news about people who die, kill, abuse children and dogs, and I only like good news”. That’s when it all started.
That was in 2010 and, since then, Só Notícia Boa has become a source of positive information and a benchmark of positive journalism for major media outlets.
How do people feel about the site?
The feedback is incredible because people aren’t used to having a space with only positive information. So they become fans; it’s really nice.
Apart from that, there’s also the question of mental health. Good news affects the chemicals that our brain produces and makes us feel better.
How can good news positively influence us as a society?
Information is the basis for a better society. As you see so much good and inspiring news, from people who help, teach and invent, you get inspired. And when you inspire one, two, three people, you’re creating a different society, one that doesn’t just focus on the negative.
Focusing more on the positive gives people more hope. This is a fundamental point of our work. When you publicize an action by someone who has done something to help the climate, the earth, someone who has created something, the other person reading on the other side says: “well, I can do that too”.
The world isn’t as bad as it seems. People aren’t all as bad as you think. There are a lot of good things and a lot of good people in Brazil, all over the world. So we can’t lose hope.
What good news related to the environment would you highlight?
We heard about a young man from the south of Brazil who created something called EcoBarriers. He makes a kind of barrier out of PET bottles to filter out impurities from the water and puts it in rivers. It started near his house and then spread.
It’s something so simple and so wonderful that, after we published it on Só Notícia Boa, it spread all over Brazil.