Positive News values survey promo and magazine collage
Positive News has launched a major project to understand what its readers care about.
The UK-based outlet , which promises “rigorous journalism about what’s going right”, is asking what people would be willing to pay for as it considers introducing a membership scheme.
It is also asking audiences about their values in an attempt to match its journalism to what they most care about.
Positive News produces a quarterly print magazine with 10,000 paying subscribers and a free website which attracts around 500,000 visits per month (according to Similarweb). It also has a weekly email newsletter with 83,000 subscribers.
The brand has been going since 1993 but relaunched as a magazine in 2016 after becoming a co-operative and selling community shares so 1,500 audience members became co-owners. There are seven members of staff.
Chief executive Sean Wood told Press Gazette: “That gave us some capital to grow, and so we invested that over about five years and developed a more sustainable and resilient business model.”
That is based mainly around reader revenue – subscriptions to the print magazine and a Guardian-style supporter scheme through which online users can make a monthly recurring donation – as well as some branded and sponsored content.
Wood said: “We’re a not-for-profit independent media organisation, so any surpluses we make are reinvested in the journalism.”
He said it was a “tough” market for independent journalism but “we’ve continued to grow slowly, which we’re proud of as a small team, and we remain sustainable”.
In the 2025/26 financial year, operating revenue grew 7% year on year and the publisher made a small surplus, Wood said citing internal reporting ahead of the final accounts.
Positive News is now looking to embark on its next phase, Wood said. “Having established an effective sustainable business model, the question then was really about how can we start trying to scale?”
The key thing to protect, he said, was the direct relationship with the audience both editorially and financially in terms of reader revenue.
Financial supporters of Positive News, which is not paywalled, currently receive perks like exclusive email updates, 10% off the magazine and invitations to the annual “inspiration meeting”.
Wood said they “don’t give a lot tangibly back outside of the journalism” but people like supporting what they do anyway.
He added that many membership offerings are “basically subscription or donation, or it’s very transactional, so we don’t want to go down that route unless it really actually feels like a real community”.
Positive News finds audience interested in matching values to journalism they consume
To help guide that decision, Positive News decided to ask its audience about what matters most to them and how the brand can, through its journalism, “support them living in a way that’s in line with those values”.
The seven-week listening project began with a survey asking people questions based on a theory of basic human values , measuring what matters to them most out of values like achievement, power, benevolence and self-direction.
It has had around 2,500 responses with a nearly 90% completion rate once people start it. Some 1,000 of those people completed it in two days from one mention five paragraphs down in an email newsletter.
“I think people are genuinely fascinated to dig into their own values and pause to ask that question about what really matters to me, deep down, and then think about does the journalism I’m consuming really reflect that, or not?” Wood said.
This survey is being followed by a series of smaller ones to understand preferences for editorial formats and channels, potential memberships and demographics. They are not asking about specific editorial topics as these choices will be informed by the values survey.
Readers are being asked what extras they might be willing to pay for, as well as whether they would want to be involved in the journalism somehow or take part in the community by connecting with the Positive News team or each other, in person or online.
Ultimately the aim is to update the Positive News editorial approach by applying the Common Cause Foundation’s toolkit for values-aware journalism (Wood is on the advisory board for that project).
He explained: “There’s obviously a lot of editorial judgement that’s instinctive and there’s a lot of assumptions being made by just seeing how the audiences respond to the content, but it’s really stepping back from that and saying, okay, what if we can let go of all those assumptions and really understand from a new starting point what do they want to hear about, and… what actually is positive to them?
“We’re in this unique situation where being called Positive News, already there’s an editorial judgement being made that what we’re covering is in some way positive, and so we’re saying it’s not just for us to decide that anymore. We really want to make sure the audience is deciding or giving us a steer on what is positive.”
He gave the example of a story about the increased prevalence of renewable energy, noting that would not be a positive story for a Shell executive, or the development of greenbelt land into housing or commercial use which could be positive or negative depending on whether you value economic benefits or nature more.
“We want to be as transparent as possible about those judgements and be able to say to the audience we see these particular things as positive because we know our audience have told us this is what they value.”
‘News as we currently do it is no longer fit for purpose’
Wood believes this values-based approach could be useful for other publishers too.
“We have an opportunity to actually give audiences information that’s closer to what they really want, which will obviously benefit us socially, but also benefit media business models, because that could improve trust, it could improve engagement, it could bring more value into the journalism.
“By asking those deeper questions, I think there’s a great opportunity now, when our industry is so disrupted, to create journalism that’s providing more value.”
He added: “We’re seeing the symptoms of how the news as we currently do it is no longer really fit for purpose, because people are disengaging, trust levels are low, the negativity bias of the news is causing people to turn away, and affect their mental health, and so beyond just our constructive journalism approach now, we’re trying to ask what can we, as a media organisation, do to offer something that people really want to pay for and really want to engage with.
“I think that’s why we go into the level of values to understand what is it people really care about and want to hear about that’s actually going to be useful to them? So it’s kind of trying to break down all the established assumptions in how we go about journalism, and I think that principle is something that all journalism could benefit from thinking about.”
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