In June 2009, when everyone was talking only about the crisis, layoffs and the euro exchange rate, I launched a website with an almost naive idea: publish only good news. I called it Știri de Bine (roughly “Good News”), and the tagline was “Romania of positive news”. Plenty of friends smiled politely. Some told me straight out that nobody reads that kind of thing.
Seven years have passed. Between 2009 and 2016, Știri de Bine was a kind of laboratory for me: about media, about the internet, but mostly about people. Now, at the end of this chapter, I want to write down what I learned. Some lessons are about journalism, some about business, and a few are simply about us Romanians.
Why positive news matters
Turn on any TV during the evening news and start counting. Accidents, crimes, political scandals, rising prices, crumbling hospitals. I am not saying these things are not true or should not be reported. I am saying that if this is the only picture you get, day after day, you end up believing you live in a country where nothing works and nobody does anything good.
And that has real consequences. Someone convinced that all is lost does not start a business, does not get involved in the community, does not help a neighbor. They start planning to emigrate. Positive news is not an escape from reality. It is the other half of it, the half that rarely makes the front page.
Good news is harder to make go viral than bad news
This was the first hard lesson. A scandal spreads by itself: people get angry, comment, argue and share. Anger and fear are extraordinary fuel for traffic. Good news, on the other hand, produces a smile, a “how lovely”, and most of the time, that is it.
I learned that a positive story has to be worked twice as hard to get half the impact of a negative one. The headline has to be concrete, not sugary. The story needs a person at its center, not an institution. The photo has to be real, not a stock image of people smiling in an office. Above all, readers have to feel the story says something about them, not just about someone else.
What people actually share
After seven years, the patterns are fairly clear. Not every piece of good news catches on. The stories that traveled furthest almost always fell into a few categories:
- People helping people. A neighbor fixing an elderly woman’s roof for free, a group of volunteers raising money for a surgery, a driver stopping to help a stranger with a breakdown. Small gestures, made without expecting anything back.
- Local initiatives. A village that renovated its own school, a small town that cleaned up its river, a community that organized a festival without a cent from city hall. People love seeing that things can get done without waiting for the state.
- Romanians who succeed. Students winning international olympiads, researchers recognized abroad, entrepreneurs who built something from scratch, athletes who won against all odds. There is a lot of national pride here, and a real hunger for role models.
- Animal stories. I admit I did not see this coming. A dog rescued from a drain can beat any government reform in shares.
What almost never worked: press releases dressed up as good news, dry statistics (however positive) and any story that smelled like an ad. Readers sense immediately when someone is trying to sell them something.
How hard it is to make money from independent online media
I have to be very honest here. An independent online publication, especially a niche one, is very hard to make profitable in Romania. Display advertising pays poorly and drops every year. Ad blocking keeps growing. Agencies prefer to buy from the big media groups or straight from Google and Facebook, which offer targeting and volume a small site simply cannot match.
Sponsored content looks like the obvious answer, but for a positive-news site it is a trap. Every brand wants to appear “positive”, and if you say yes too often, readers can no longer tell what is news and what is paid for. Trust, once lost, does not come back. As an entrepreneur, it helped me to look at the project through that lens too: a product people love is not automatically a business. I wrote more about the gap between passion and a business model in my piece on 20 years of entrepreneurship in Romania.
Facebook: best friend and most unpredictable partner
Around 2010 to 2012, Facebook looked like a miracle for a site like Știri de Bine. Uplifting stories are exactly the kind of content people want to show their friends. A page with active fans could bring more traffic than Google. I built a lot on that, maybe too much.
Then the algorithm started to change. Especially since 2014, the organic reach of pages has kept falling: posts reach a fraction of the fans you worked so hard to gather, and the rest you can only reach by paying. Facebook penalized clickbait headlines, favored content from friends and family, pushed native video, and is now testing articles that load directly inside the app, without readers ever reaching the publisher’s site. Every change makes sense from Facebook’s point of view. From a small publisher’s point of view, it means the rules of the game change every quarter, and nobody asks you.
The lesson is simple and painful: an audience on a platform is not yours, it is rented. I looked at the same problem from the e-commerce side when I compared Facebook Ads and Google AdWords for an online store, but for media the dependence is even greater.
What I would do differently
If I were starting a similar project today, knowing what I know now, I would change a few things:
- I would build an email list from day one. It is the only channel no algorithm can take away. A subscriber who reads you over morning coffee is worth more than ten fans on a page.
- I would have a revenue model designed from the start, not bolted on later. Subscriptions, events or transparent editorial partnerships, with clear rules published openly.
- I would invest more in community. The best stories come from readers. An easy way for people to send in stories from their own towns would have been worth more than any newsroom.
- I would do less, but better. One well-documented story, with good photos and a real person at its heart, is worth ten short items picked up from other sites. Preparation beats volume in media too.
- I would diversify distribution earlier: Google, newsletters, partnerships with local publications, not just Facebook.
What stays with me
Beyond all the business lessons, Știri de Bine changed me as a person. Seven years of looking for good news every day made me notice it more easily in everyday life. The Romania I discovered through these stories is full of people doing beautiful things without waiting for applause. They do not make the five o’clock news, but they exist, and there are far more of them than we think.
I am convinced the need for good news will not go away. Quite the opposite: the louder the stream of scandal gets, the more people will look for a place to breathe. The model that turns this into a sustainable business may not have been invented yet. But it will be.
What kind of positive news would you like to read more often? And would you ever pay for a publication that brings you only good news?