Did you know that Indonesia has raised the minimum age for marriage from 16 to 19 years? That the number of yearly deaths caused by air pollution in Europe has more than halved since 1990? That there are no more landmines in Chile? Or that the last Ebola patient has been released in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

There are unfortunately a lot of sad and horrible things happening in the world, and they tend to take up most, if not all, of the media spotlight. Whenever you open a newspaper or look up news online, you usually get bombarded with articles about the depressing things in the world: war, poverty, and recently coronavirus, just to mention a few. 

But that is not what this article will be about. Thankfully, there are also a lot of amazing things that happen. However, because those things usually have less of a shock factor or are less immediately interesting, they are often neglected in the media, presenting a rather bleak world view. That is where World’s Best News comes into the picture.

World’s Best News is an independent news organisation that makes constructive journalism with focus on solutions and progress in global development. Their goal is to help people achieve a more nuanced world view and show people that the world is actually better than many believe, as well as spread awareness of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, called the SDGs. If you are interested, you can read more about those here.

World’s Best News began as a Danish awareness campaign in 2010. Studies showed that people generally thought the world was worse than it is in relation to poverty reduction, diseases and war. Therefore, the campaign was created with the purpose of informing the population of the progress that is actually happening. In 2016, World’s Best News was founded as an independent organisation. Since 2015, the organisation has partnered with the EU Commission to convey news about the Global Goals to all Europeans. World’s Best News is therefore also published in a lot of European languages in order to reach more people. There are localised organisation branches in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. 

World’s Best News publishes articles on their websites as well as social media. They partner on a bunch of events, campaigns and workshops, as well as make a yearly newspaper. In Denmark, they have articles in some regular newspapers as well on the tv-screens in the trains.

As mentioned earlier, World’s Best News uses “constructive journalism”. In “regular” journalism, the focus is on conflicts and problems in society, and therefore, there is often an imbalance in the coverage of especially development countries, where all the focus goes to the bad things; war, famine and disasters. And while they are obviously important to know about, the focus on these “breaking news” events often paints a bleaker picture than how the world actually is. With a lot of the positive development in the world there isn’t an exact date you can pin it on, and therefore it can be hard to make it seem like “news” or “an event”. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to write or know about. With constructive journalism you have to not only look at the problems, but also possible solutions. This takes the focus away from the “break news” and makes it easier to focus on progress and processes. It is important to highlight both good and bad to present a more nuanced view of the situation.

A study from 2015 showed that 55% of Danes believed that the world had gotten worse through the past 20 years, while the opposite is actually true. With the way most newspapers focus on the “bad” news, this isn’t that surprising. That is why an organisation such as World’s Best News is important.