As the year begins, don’t look away from the headlines, look better and deeper |
I once heard that a journalist, stunned by the horrors they’d witnessed while on assignment as a foreign correspondent, was almost equally shocked to find themselves seeking solace in the strangest of places: a church. Not to pray; that wasn’t their thing. But to sit and take stock in silence – perhaps the most appropriate response when processing history’s bloody body count.
If we’re news junkies, or just extremely online, we’re a little like that traumatised journalist. A little. More removed from frontline carnage, sure, but subject to a similar onslaught of non-stop bad news: polarisation, the climate crisis, grim domestic violence statistics. The rising cost of living, the rise of the far right, and AI threatening to upend our livelihoods.
What to do with all the angst stirred up by negative headlines? We need a better way to cope than avoiding the news (40% of us around the world are already doing that, according to a 2025 Reuters study) or numbing out to mindless reels.
So, as a new year of news begins, I’m........