Welcome to TGNR Sunday Brunch!

(Image Credit: K. Strubberg/TGNR)

The Good News Review: Sunday Brunch is a new segment to the site. Sunday Brunch will be a TGNR exclusive piece to be published on Sunday’s that will feature unique first person stories and accounts. All for the purpose of enriching the great leisure day of the week. Our first Sunday Brunch comes from the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Good News Review, Kristen E. Strubberg. Kristen recounts the extraordinary events that ultimately gave rise to, “The refuge from all the other news.”

By Kristen E. Strubberg Founder & Editor-in-Chief

The inception of this site is perhaps a bit predictable: it was born from bad news or, rather, my response to bad news. My fiancé was in intensive care following multiple emergency surgeries. There were uncertainties, questions that couldn’t or wouldn’t be answered. They say “no news is good news,” but this time I beg to differ.

I would visit him before I started work (I worked the swing shift at a different nearby hospital) and return afterwards to say goodnight. In between, I would do my best to distract myself. I reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy and continued my avid habit of reading all news within my digital reach. During such readings I was appalled at the preponderance across all outlets of terrible, tragic stories many of which weren’t even news. They did not update readers on anything significant, just strange, morose happenings more appropriate for Tales from the Crypt. They did not inform or educate, they were pornographic. These stories were the last thing I wanted to read.  So, I began searching for stories I found uplifting because they showed the best part of humanity. Moreover these were stories with bite – not “puff pieces” to which good news has been relegated in some journalistic circles. These good news stories showed advances in science, people helping others, preservation of  the planet and all its creatures, and so on. Not all of these stories had a happy ending. What they did have was a story that demonstrated the goodness I believe is inherent to this existence.

I began to collect these good news stories as a form of therapy, a way to combat the emotional chaos I felt far too often at the time. That therapy evolved into this site, at first as a creative outlet to help me cope during a crisis but turned into a conviction that I’m not the only one fed up with this excess of violent, disturbing “news” filling the media. Once my fiancé’s health stabilized and he could return home, he joined my mission and helps find stories, edit, and now actively contributes entries to the site.

I understand that “bad news sells.”  However, maybe through efforts like The Good News Review, that can change.

–Kristen E. Strubberg, Founder & Editor-in-Chief