How much UK news is too bad to publish?

How we measure

Every news day, our pipeline reads hundreds of articles from the BBC, The Guardian, GOV.UK, NHS England, university press offices, and a curated set of positive-news feeds. Each candidate goes through several editorial gates before a writer is commissioned to cover it.

A story can fail the gates for several reasons. Crime and court reports are filtered out. So are bereavement and memorial pieces, controversies and outrage cycles, statistical-concern reportage of the “one in five” framing, and any story with a positivity rating below our editorial floor. What survives goes to a local writer to be told as good news.

The Good News Index is the inverse: the percentage of stories the gates rejected, expressed as the labour we did so the reader didn’t have to. Higher means a heavier news day, more bad news in the world, more work to find the bright spots. The number doesn’t describe the world; it describes the brand promise made measurable.

We also sort what we filter into themes, crime and courts, grief, outrage, big pharma, climate alarm, and the rest, using the same words the gates already act on. Nothing is invented or guessed: a story is only ever counted under a theme it genuinely matches, which is why the “biggest culprit” above is something you can audit. Stories we simply found too flat or out-ranked, with no specific bad-news theme, are counted separately and never named as a culprit.