| |
Bad news sells08 March 2009 |  0 comments |  Print This Page
Spring is showing itself in the northern hemisphere, and very welcome it is too if you like crocuses and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, which seems to come on the radio every day right now.
Journalists are coming in for a lot of criticism these days, even more than usual. Apparently, we are making out that things in the global economy are worse than they really are, exaggerating bad news and scandal, ignoring anything positive, turning totally on its head the advice that Bing Crosby once belted out and accentuating the negative.
In the first week of March, like almost every other week in the year, 25 news stories went onto leatherbiz.com. Assessing them as objectively as I can, I'd say 16 of them are positive about developments in the leather industry worldwide, two are neutral and seven are negative. So we have accentuated the positive here as much as we can, while breaking less good news, such as the troubles at Independência in Brazil, soberly, factually and professionally.
By the end of the week, the three most read stories on the site, with a combined 26.7% share of all traffic, were ‘doom and gloom’ ones; no positive news items came anywhere near them for popularity.
This is not new and goes some way towards explaining why newspapers, broadcasters and magazine publishers often appear to favour bad news—bad news sells. There is a perception that this is what people have the greatest appetite for.
My days of studying psychology are long behind me, but I would guess that part of the attraction of other people’s bad news is that we derive encouragement from the idea that the bad stuff isn't affecting only us, which could be an indicator that negative results are not entirely our fault, that the business decisions we took on the road to where we are today were the right ones at the time.
I am of the opinion that it's part of human nature to be optimistic and believe, therefore, that there are better times around the corner. How long it will take to turn the corner is another question and one that nobody has a definite answer to. Nevertheless, common sense tells us that if we are to reach the corner eventually, we must keep moving forward, even if only slowly.
The tide will turn; it always does. And while we're waiting, we can always rely on Beethoven to cheer us up.
Stephen Tierney
Editor
Add your comment
|
|
|