A free weekly newspaper in London is attempting to cheer up its readers this week by leaving out all the bad news.

The Essex-based Yellow Advertiser is staging its first ever “Good News Week” to help beat the recession blues.

Editor Greg Fidgeon is promising to fill the paper with “uplifting” stories about new jobs, new investment in schools and people making miraculous recoveries from illness.

Meanwhile anyone wanting to read about murders, fires, accidents and redundancies will have to visit the paper’s website instead.

Said Greg: “We’ve had a miserable winter – the weather has been terrible, the recession is on-going and much of the media has become just a harbinger of doom.

“While Yellow Advertiser always tries to err on the positive side of things whenever we can, we wanted to mark the official start of British Summer Time with nothing but good news.

“Of course, we cannot say bad news will not happen this week. But those wishing to read it will have to do so on our website – www.yellowad.co.uk – because it will not appear in print.

“Our newspapers will focus on stories that make people feel happy, inspired and more positive. As far as we’re aware, this have never been done before and we’re hoping our readers will enjoy the stories just as much as we’ve enjoyed finding them.”

The Good News Week editions will be out tomorrow and Thursday.

Comments

OldishHack (31/03/2009 11:57:29)
Let’s hope self-publicist Mr Fidgeon rises the greasy pole of his particular organistion soon and not treat his readers or would he call them customers with contempt.

old cynic (31/03/2009 13:05:29)
His ‘newspaper’ will be almost empty then.
It seems to me to be a very strange way to drive the readership towards the website.

Dreading the future (31/03/2009 13:36:09)
If the edition of the Yellow Advertiser that circulates in my area is anything to go by, the readers won’t notice the difference. There is barely a page-worth of news in it anyway.

Mike (31/03/2009 16:34:39)
Dreading the future, that’s what you get when you staff the newsroom with too few too young inexperienced people who don’t have senior mentors and don’t know what a real story looks like unless it comes off the police and fire brigade blotters.