A typical day’s top stories on Google:

“11-year-old boy confessed to killing former mayor of a small Louisiana town and his daughter.”

“A man was found dead in a closet at a Florida nursing home.”

“Apalachee High School shooting leaves at least four dead.”

“In Ukraine’s supposed safe haven city, a family is wiped out by a Russian missile strike.”

   The news has become all too predictable; every day there are fresh stories, but they are all written in the same tragic font. The rise of 24-hour news and social media have created a never-ending stream of violent, dire content that has impacted readers, writers and policymaking for the worse.

   The dean of Boston University School of Public Health, Dr. Sandro Galea, explains in an interview with NPR that the viewing of trauma in media outlets can cause psychological distress or mental health issues among viewers. Research after 9/11 found that specifically watching images of people being hurt had the greatest impact on audiences.

   Unsurprisingly, these impacts are even more severe for the reporters who are expected to keep researching and writing these types of stories day after day.

   “As bad as this may be for the audience, it’s even worse for the people who are covering these stories,” journalist and UF professor Dr. Kim Walsh-Childers said. “For health reporters who were covering COVID non-stop it was very traumatic … they were constantly having to write about people dying.”

   The constant flood of bad news brought on by 24/7 coverage of everything that’s wrong with the world has left people with the feeling that they no longer have the power to make a difference, which has harmed civic involvement.

   “[It] makes sense.” Walsh-Childers said. “If the big problem in your city is homelessness, but you feel like there’s homelessness everywhere and nobody knows how to solve the problem, why would you get involved? Nobody likes fighting losing battles.”

   However, despite today’s overwhelming number of tragic headlines, journalism seems to be headed in a more positive direction, even if slowly.

   Walsh-Childers explains that the coverage of mass shootings has recently evolved for the better. Previously, news outlets focused heavily on the shooter and their life, which raised concerns that the media was inspiring copycats to commit similar actions because they desired this “fame.” In 2022, however, there was a notable shift in the way publications chose to cover mass shootings, choosing to focus on the victims instead of the perpetrator.

   Moving forward, Walsh-Childers believes journalists can continue this trend of change by shifting the way they cover tragic issues to focus on solutions over problems. It’s important reporters don’t stop discussing these topics because people deserve to know when bad things are happening, but it is imperative that those discussions start becoming more solutions-based.

   Solutions journalism is an emerging field of journalism that focuses on solutions-based coverage of global issues. The movement has been led by the Solutions Journalism Network, but continued by big name publications too like BBC, Politico and the Seattle Times, who have all started columns (People Fixing the World, What Works, the Education Lab, respectively) dedicated to solutions journalism.

   “Solutions journalism is [the idea] that rather than focusing all of our attention on things that are going badly, maybe it would make a lot more sense if we tried to find places where things were working,” Walsh-Childers said.

   Walsh-Childers gives the example of an article on graduation rates to show what solutions journalism looks like in action.

   “If I’m going to tell you about how our schools’ graduation rates are bad, doesn’t it make more sense to say, ‘yeah, ours are bad, but look at this other school over here that’s in a very similar community, very similar population and their graduation rates are actually pretty good,’” Walsh-Childers said. “So what is it they’re doing that we’re not?”

   Despite its recency, studies on solutions journalism have shown that it makes audiences feel less depressed and less anxious. Most notably, solutions journalism has made people more willing to get involved in global issues, which has given it the potential to reinvigorate civic engagement.

   “If we find places that are actually making some difference, then it’s a lot more appealing to people to try to be involved in those activities because they don’t feel like they’re fighting a losing battle anymore,” Walsh-Childers said.