1) The Guardian's Upside https://www.theguardian.com/world/series/the-upside-weekly-r...
2) Future Crunch https://futurecrunch.substack.com/
3) Positive News https://www.positive.news/
4) The Good Newsletter https://www.goodgoodgood.co/goodnewsletter
A big problem I've had in seeking explicitly "positive" news is a lot of it is actually negative "news" just spun in a positive light. Articles like "5 year old cancer patient has successful GoFundMe to pay for chemo". That's not positive (nor is it news), it's just highlighting the societal problem that unexpected medical costs in America can bankrupt entire families unless their case is sympathetic enough to get random people to pay the cost.
The other kind of positive news I see often is things that sound great but aren't actually real. Like "New breakthrough battery technology means batteries last for 1000 years" but there's never a follow-up (I guess it would be negative news then) that this "breakthrough" only exists in the lab and can't actually be turned into real batteries.
After spending a few months going out of my way to read explicitly positive news, I find it worse than ever. Because a lot of explicitly positive news isn't actually news, and a lot of it isn't actually positive either.
Edit - I guess this was just a bummer with no positive, and I apologize for that. What I've ended up doing right now is limiting where I get my news from and dramatically slowing down my news consumption. The reason we commonly think the 70s/80s/90s had such better music than today is because we've already let time filter out the bad music so we only remember the good stuff. I treat news the same, if it's something I need to know I will still hear about it tomorrow or the next day. Seeing "news" happen in real time with BREAKING NEWS slathered across the page makes it seem more important than it actually is. Seeing it as a footnote a few days later often doesn't change the store but changes your perception of that story. And it also filters out the unimportant things that aren't worth talking about because they're not going to be talked about tomorrow or the day after.
The news app TheSkimm has actually been helpful, it's not explicitly positive news but it's important news slowed down and explained properly, while everything else is just a headline or not even mentioned at all. Finding a slower news source would be my recommendation rather than filtering yourself to explicitly positive news.
You want to maintain some awareness of world and local events, shifting political themes, and technological developments as an actualized adult. Too much of it though is unhealthy and it's weird that we all seem to readily agree that it's unhealthy but still keep doing it.
I grew up before the 24-hour news cycle. Back then, "the news" was 15 pages of newspaper that you flipped through during breakfast. There was a real, defined end to the news stream: the last page. Or, maybe a few pages before the last, since it devolved into "the funnies" (which weren't, even then), Anne Landers, and ads for things nobody much cared about.
But before you were done with breakfast you were caught up on everything and you got on with your day.
That's a pattern I try to enforce now. It's hard. I have to unwire 20 years of infotainment addiction and modern life isn't super supportive of that. But on the better-disciplined days I'm consistently happier, more productive, better.
I mean if the CCP wanted, they could label 24hr news a counterrevolutionary conspiracy by the US to distract citizens and tell them from now on news will be delivered on a schedule to ensure the continued success of... their success.
What a peek into behavior that would be...
I somewhat think that the idea of scheduled dissemination for news and world events needs should go out of fashion in a similar way, as it would be less "corrupted", but don't think it will for a long time at the very least.
The idea of news is not purely about information delivery to most people. People really want opinions about news far less than raw reporting of events. Also people find comfort, meaning, and connection in the ritual of scheduled content. For that emotional need to be fulfilled, they seek content aligned with their social and economic bubbles.
It's silly, and as a result I keep my consumption of news to an absolute minimum.
Now if only I could just filter HN to only show me tech stories instead of "news".
It runs once per day at 8p PST so that I’m not constantly getting hit with headlines or refreshing it for new news like a junky ... and my favorite part is that each page loads with one request (no JS, Ada, etc)
I’ve also recently found https://reasonstobecheerful.world - also excellent and updated regularly.