With Unsung Heroes in Mind, Hopeful News Looks for Niche

Burned out on O.J. and fed up with Fergie? Relief may be coming to a newsstand near you.

In recent months, a magazine and wire service have started offering hope journalism--news about real people who make a difference.

“There are a quarter of a billion people in this country. If you read the paper, you get the feeling that most of them are involved in drugs and mayhem, crime and disaster,” said Paul Martin Du Bois, who with his wife, Frances Moore Lappe, founded the American News Service.

“A significant proportion of this quarter billion population are also involved very constructively in addressing the issues of education, housing, the environment, integration, inadequate human services and poverty.”

So with the unsung heroes in mind, the American News Service and Hope magazine, which are not affiliated with one another, are delivering a different kind of news.

“I think that we both want to call attention to the extraordinary acts and efforts of ordinary individuals,” said Jon Wilson, editor and publisher of Hope magazine.

The American News Service shipped its first four stories last fall, and has been sending them twice-monthly to nearly 600 media outlets nationwide. They are free, for now.

“In the streets where drug pushers do their dealing and killing, citizens have found a way to exact a bit of poetic justice: The ill-gotten gains of drug dealers are helping fund efforts to prevent drug-abuse,” free-lancer Sue Telingator wrote for ANS in a story about communities taking a share of the money from drug forfeitures.

Other ANS articles covered such diverse topics as a meeting between abortion foes and pro-choice advocates and efforts to revitalize urban parks.

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The stories are “well done, well edited, a good length for newspapers,” said Mike Duggan, managing editor of Knight-Ridder/Tribune news service. “But the important thing is they offer solutions.”

The articles have been well-received, appearing in the Houston Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, the Seattle Times and the Omaha World-Herald, among others.

“We’re not providing people with hope. We’re not providing them with optimism. We’re providing them with facts,” Du Bois said.

Dan Shea, executive news editor at the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, said his paper has run ANS copy on Sundays, when editors are looking for “a different kind of look at the news and a little more in-depth journalism.”

Hope magazine, subtitled: “Humanity Making a Difference,” looks less at community efforts and more at the achievements of individuals. In the first issue, which hit the stands in March, articles told about a cellist who played in the streets of Sarajevo during a bombing; a former drug addict who now runs an outreach program for gang members in Boston and a carpenter who built his new bride a house as he was dying of cancer.

Hardly happy news, but stories that leave most readers with a sense of hope.

“I just think we need to understand one another better,” Wilson said. “But I don’t think we need a spiritual context or a religious context or a political context. We just need to be in a community,” and his vision is that the magazine will provide that community.

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Nancy Woodhull, executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in New York, said the media is always criticized for focusing too much on the negative.

It’s not that writers avoid good news, but, “What people remember is the stuff that really hits them emotionally and often the emotion that is hit . . . is their fear,” she said.

Although writing on related topics, Du Bois and Lappe are as different from Wilson as newsprint is from magazine gloss. Wilson is a college dropout who turned his love of yacht carpentry into the successful WoodenBoat magazine.

Du Bois holds a doctorate in public administration from Cornell University and had a successful career as an academic. Lappe wrote the successful 1971 book “Diet for a Small Planet.” As co-founders in 1990 of the Center for Living Democracy, which seeks to foster grass-roots involvement in the democratic process, they clearly have an agenda.

Funding for ANS, which runs about $400,000 a year, comes from four public policy foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers fund, the Surdna Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation and the Rapoport Foundation.

Du Bois and Lappe run the service with a nationwide team of about 20 freelance writers out of the center’s headquarters in Brattleboro, Vt.

Wilson operates with another full-time editor and a staff of about a dozen freelancers out of the WoodenBoat office in Brooklin, Maine. He has about 4,000 subscribers and puts 65,000 of the $4.95 magazines on newsstands. He expects an annual budget of about $300,000.

But an admitted dreamer and idealist, Wilson notes that when he launched WoodenBoat in 1974, he was in much the same situation. And when he stepped down as editor in late 1994, it had a circulation of 106,000.

“I felt if you could do something like that with a field like wooden boats, what could you do with something even more important,” Wilson said, “and the more important field for me was humanity.”