Pink Smiling News in a grey World

INTRODUCTION

Why do bad-news stories seem to sell better than good ones? Why are we drawn to disasters, stock market crashes, wars, and scandals, even as we complain that the media never report anything positive? From the yellow journalism of the nineteenth century to today’s relentless pursuit of digital clicks, humanity’s fascination with misfortune has proven profitable. But what does science tell us about our peculiar appetite for misery? And who is really right, the incurable optimist who sees opportunity in every catastrophe, or the pessimist who forever anticipates the next collapse? With the help of philosophers, stock market speculators, a blind Swedish Nobel laureate, and a woman who laughs so hard she tears a hole in the newspaper, we set out to find the answer. A story about fear, money, optimism and pessimism – and why a good laugh may be our best defence against a world in which the apocalypse always seems to be just one headline away.

“The Last Laugh - A Ballad of Bulls, Bears and Bad News

The market crashed, the bankers cried,
The bulls gave up, the bears replied:
“We told you so! The end is near!”
And raised their glasses, full of fear.

The headlines screamed, the figures fell,
The papers sold disaster well.
For every loss and every tear,
Another profit would appear.

Pangloss declared, “All must be right!
The darkest day precedes the light.”
Cassandra sighed, “I’ve warned you all.”
And watched another empire fall.

Schopenhauer shook his head:
“I told you life was mostly dread.”
But Dalén smiled, despite the gloom:
“Be an optimist. Give hope some room.”

Then through the pink, a woman burst,
And laughed as though the world were cursed.
She laughed at stocks, at doom, at fate,
At every headline marked “TOO LATE!”

The paper tore, the numbers flew,
The sky turned pink instead of blue.
And all the prophets, wise and grim,
Looked rather foolish next to her grin.

For fear may sell and markets fall,
And bears may think they know it all.
But when the final bell is rung,
And every dreadful song is sung,

One truth remains when all is through:
The world may end – but here’s the clue:
If doom is what the papers sell,
The last laugh won’t be theirs as well.”
Malmö, October 2026

Pink News in a Grey World - The Art of Making Money from Other People’s Misfortunes

Prologue – When the World Ends with a Roar of Laughter

Imagine a newspaper front page where all the headlines scream at once. The stock market has suffered a complete and irreversible collapse; interest rates have been raised to an astronomical 17.99 per cent; the Prime Minister has addressed the nation live on television and officially cancelled Christmas; and, to cap it all, fashion giant H&M announces that its entire winter collection consists exclusively of ready-made holes. On the international stage, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin also appear to have discovered a tenderness for one another that makes the old Cold War look like a minor marital disagreement. Eternal Love, the newspaper proclaims.

It is an apocalyptic tableau, an utterly catastrophic portrait of the present day. Yet amid all this printed misery, something remarkable happens. A woman laughs so violently that she bursts through the pink newspaper page. The paper tears, her bright pink lips part in laughter, and for one brief moment all the world’s accumulated disasters seem like one enormous joke.

A fascinating paradox lies beneath that pink surface. We often claim, with an air of weary moral superiority, that we long for good news. We call for constructive journalism, heartwarming stories and reports about local enthusiasts planting geraniums. Yet it is often the complete disaster that makes us stop, widen our eyes and click on the screen. Perhaps the truly interesting question is not why the media serve us so much misery, but why we ourselves return to it so eagerly – only to complain a moment later that the newspapers are full of it.

From the Yellow Press to the Pink

However, it would be unfair to blame the internet for our fascination with misfortune. Long before anyone had heard of clicks, algorithms or digital subscriptions, newspaper publishers had discovered that human misery was an exceptionally profitable commodity.

Murders, accidents, scandals, affairs and royal indiscretions had a remarkable ability to capture the public imagination. A quiet account of a well-run municipal council meeting could hardly compete with news that a prominent society lady had run away with her coachman’s younger brother, especially if the coachman himself had also disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

During the nineteenth century, this insight evolved into a more deliberate commercial strategy. Newspapers competed not only to break the news first but also to make it as sensational as possible. The bigger the headlines, the more attention they attracted. The bloodier the crime, the better the sales.

In the United States, this development became associated with two of the most colourful figures in newspaper history, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. During the 1890s, their New York newspapers waged a ruthless battle for readers. Sensational revelations, dramatic illustrations and enormous headlines became effective weapons in the competition.

During this period, the term yellow journalism also emerged. The term came from the popular cartoon character The Yellow Kid, who became the subject of a highly publicised rivalry between newspapers. Over time, the term came to describe journalism in which sensationalism and dramatic presentation sometimes took precedence over accuracy and reflection.

The most famous example was the coverage of the conflict between the United States and Spain over Cuba in the late 1890s. The newspapers’ dramatic, sometimes misleading accounts helped inflame public opinion, though historians have long debated their role in the outbreak of the Spanish-American War.

But the commercial lesson had already been established. A genuine catastrophe wasn’t necessary to sell a newspaper. Sometimes it was enough to make an ordinary event look like one.

The yellow press had thus discovered something the pink press, more than a century later, could still benefit from. The difference is that yesterday’s newspaper publishers had to wait until the following morning to see their sales figures. In contrast, today’s editor can monitor readers’ reactions second by second and change a headline before the coffee has had time to go cold.

The Savannah’s Survival Instinct Moves into the Smartphone

But why does this work? Why are human beings so fond of letting themselves be frightened, outraged, and appalled?

This is not merely an old, cynical truth muttered over lukewarm coffee in provincial newsrooms. Research in both psychology and media studies strongly supports this phenomenon. One important explanation is what psychologists call“negativity bias”: our tendency to pay greater attention to negative information and sometimes weigh it more heavily than positive information.

One possible explanation lies in our evolutionary history. To understand it, we must look back, very far back, to a time when humanity’s greatest concerns were not stock prices, central bank interest rates or parking charges.

On the African savannah, detecting threats quickly could mean life or death. Someone who paused to admire a particularly magnificent sunset risked making it their final encounter with nature if they failed to notice a lion creeping through the tall grass. The threat demanded immediate action; beauty could wait.

Those especially alert to danger may have had an advantage over those who devoted too much time to life’s more pleasant aspects. This does not mean evolution alone explains modern news habits, but it offers a possible background for why threatening information captures our attention so readily.

What may once have helped our ancestors survive now helps newspaper editors and algorithms capture our attention. The savannah’s survival instinct has moved into the smartphone.

And there it has acquired a peculiar new life. Stock market crashes, government crises, pandemics, and looming economic collapses have replaced the lion. We no longer need to run for our lives. We only need to open a news app to feel we ought to.

When the body reads the Newspaper

An international study published in the 2019 scientific journal PNAS found that negative news can provoke stronger physical reactions. Researchers examined more than 1,000 people in 17 countries across six continents and recorded how their bodies reacted to different news reports.

The results showed that participants, on average, exhibited stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. At the same time, individual differences varied considerably. Not everyone reacted in the same way, but the overall pattern was clear.

Our bodies still seem to take threatening news more seriously than encouraging reports. Evolution apparently hasn’t had time to adapt to evening tabloid headlines, or to the modern phenomenon of “Alternative News.”

One might say the brain operates like a very old, highly nervous news editor. It remains constantly alert to everything that might go wrong, while showing far less interest in what is going well.

A headline announcing that the world economy is developing more or less as expected is unlikely to set the heart racing. But announce that the entire financial system is on the verge of imminent collapse, and the brain’s night desk has already sounded the alarm.

Two point three per cent more misery

When this human tendency meets the modern media economy, an almost perfect commercial symbiosis emerges. Our anxiety can now be measured, analysed and quantified.

In a 2023 study published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers examined about 105,000 headline variations from the American website ”Upworthy”. The dataset comprised around 5.7 million clicks and more than 370 million headline impressions.

The results were as clear as they were commercially tempting. For a headline of average length, the click-through rate increased by approximately 2.3 per cent for each additional negatively charged word. On average, positive words had the opposite effect, reducing the click-through rate by about one per cent per word.

It is, of course, important to remember that the study focused on one particular website and its audience. The result does not mean that everyone always prefers bad news. But it shows how small changes in a headline’s emotional tone can influence readers’ behaviour.

For a newspaper editor with commercial ambitions, this discovery is almost irresistible.

Why write that a company’s outlook has slightly deteriorated when you can announce it is facing imminent collapse? Why describe a temporary downturn as a catastrophe when the word is so conveniently close at hand?

The old journalistic saying, “if it bleeds, it leads”, has acquired a digital equivalent. These days, it does not even have to bleed. It is enough for someone to write that it will soon.

Here, biology and the modern media economy meet in a perfect, though problematic, symbiosis. Journalism, of course, has its own traditional news values. Conflicts, scandals and sudden disasters make dramatic stories that are easy to package. A stock market crash unfolds over a few dramatic hours, producing equally dramatic graphs. A gradual improvement in global living standards or public health takes decades and is about as exciting to watch as paint drying.

The world may not be getting worse with every passing day. But anyone who tells us that is likely to capture our attention.

When Readers Grow Tired of the Apocalypse

But if misery sells so well, why are media companies worldwide concerned about declining interest and shifting news habits?

This is where we must distinguish between what captures fleeting attention and what builds a lasting relationship with a reader. A negative headline may prompt a click, but it doesn’t mean they’ll become a loyal, paying subscriber. A moment of excitement is not the same as a lifelong relationship.

Indeed, research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reveals a troubling countertrend.

In its “Digital News Report 2025”, 40 per cent of respondents across the surveyed markets said they sometimes or often avoided the news, compared with 29 per cent in 2017.

The reasons people avoid news vary. For some, it is a matter of limited time or lack of interest. For others, it is the feeling of being constantly confronted with wars, conflicts, political arguments and problems over which they have no control.

The news ceases to be a means of understanding the world and becomes yet another source of anxiety.

It is a peculiar business model. First, you frighten readers into opening the newspaper. Then you risk frightening them so thoroughly that they eventually stop opening it. What generates more clicks in the short term may, in the longer term, drive readers away from the news altogether.

The commercial pursuit of instant reactions thus risks exhausting the very attention it relies on.

People who once needed to stay alert for the occasional lion on the savannah are now expected to respond to hundreds of threats every day. Perhaps it is hardly surprising that, in the end, they switch off their phones and go outside to watch the sunset.

The Pink Counter-Revolution

This is why the pink colour of our front page is more than a mere aesthetic detail. It reminds us that we need an antidote to the constant stream of catastrophes.

If journalism only reflects the savannah’s scenes of terror, we risk losing our ability to see the whole picture. We learn everything about what goes wrong, but increasingly little about what, despite everything, is going right. We learn to fear the future, but not always to understand it.

This does not, of course, mean that journalists should start embellishing reality, concealing conflicts, or replacing investigative reporting with cheerful stories about happy people and well-tended flowerbeds. A free press must expose wrongdoing, scrutinise those in power, and report on disasters, even when the truth is unpleasant.

But there is a difference between describing the world’s problems and turning the very atmosphere of impending doom into a business model.

And this is where humour comes in.

Humour, irony, and deliberately exaggerated perspectives don’t necessarily blind us to the world’s seriousness. On the contrary, they can help us endure it. By exaggerating catastrophes to the point of absurdity, we can sometimes reveal how absurd our own reactions to them have become.

Our pink front page is therefore not an invitation to stop reading the news. Rather, it invites you to read with a little perspective, not to mistake every dramatic headline for the end of the world, and to remember that reality is almost always larger and more complicated than anything that can fit into a newspaper column.

After all, it’s comforting to know that even an interest rate of 17.99 per cent doesn’t give the Prime Minister the right to cancel Christmas. Interest rates soared in September 1992, and even then the world did not end.

Between Pangloss and Cassandra – The optimists, the pessimists and the end of the World

However, some people refuse to be discouraged even by the most catastrophic front page of a newspaper. Others regard every piece of good news as an unfortunate misunderstanding.

The former are usually called optimists. The latter, pessimists. Both have accompanied humanity throughout history and produced distinguished representatives.

If we seek the philosophical forebear of optimism in modern European intellectual history, we arrive at the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. At the end of the seventeenth century, he articulated a worldview later associated with optimism. Leibniz maintained that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

This did not mean he denied suffering. He argued that an all-knowing and benevolent creator, faced with every conceivable possibility, must have chosen the best world overall. Events that seemed evil to humans could therefore be part of a greater order beyond human understanding.

It was a magnificent idea, but it also invited considerable abuse.

The French writer Voltaire gave it an immortal satirical embodiment in his 1759 novel Candide. There we meet Dr Pangloss, a philosopher who, with almost supernatural persistence, insists that everything happens for the best, no matter how many wars, earthquakes, diseases, and personal catastrophes befall him and those around him.

Pangloss is the consummate optimist, but also a caricature of optimism. He can explain why a catastrophe is actually a blessing, but has considerably more difficulty doing anything about it.

If he read our pink front page, his reaction would be easy to imagine. The stock market crash would be necessary for future prosperity, the bank’s bankruptcy a step towards a higher economic order, and cancelling Christmas a welcome opportunity for spiritual reflection.

Even H&M’s clothes full of holes would probably seem to him a carefully considered adaptation to climate change.

But optimism need not be quite so naive.

As far back as antiquity, the Greek philosopher Epicurus sought a way to free humanity from constant fear. He believed much of our suffering stemmed from fear of the gods, death, and things beyond our control. Through friendship, moderation, and philosophical reflection, people could find peace of mind instead.

This was not optimism that promised everything would turn out well. Rather, it was an approach to life that suggested a good life was possible even when the world around us was uncertain.

An even more defiant variation appears in the myth of Sisyphus, the man the gods condemned to roll a stone up a mountain for all eternity, only to see it roll back down again.

The French philosopher Albert Camus made Sisyphus a symbol of humanity’s encounter with the absurd. Sisyphus knows his work will never end. He knows the stone will fall. Yet he continues.

Camus ends his famous essay with the words, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This is not mere optimism. It refuses to let meaninglessness have the final word. Sisyphus cannot change his punishment, but he can choose his attitude toward it. In this defiance, Camus finds a form of human freedom.

One might say Sisyphus is the only stock market investor who knows with absolute certainty that the graph will fall, yet still returns the next morning.

This stubborn faith in the future has also found more practical expression in the business world.

One of the most remarkable figures was Gustaf Dalén, the Swedish inventor and founder of AGA.

In 1912, Dalén lost his sight in a serious explosion during experiments with gas accumulators. That same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Despite his blindness, he remained active in the company and stayed interested in technological development.

During the economic depression of the 1930s, he also became associated with the famous little lapel pins bearing the words “Var Optimist” – Be an Optimist. The message was simple, almost provocatively so, at a time when unemployment, bankruptcies and economic uncertainty dominated society.

Here was a man who had lost his sight, yet not his faith in the future.

It would, of course, be an oversimplification to claim that optimism alone could overcome depression. Dalén was an inventor and businessman, not a magician. Yet his little pin expressed something far greater than its modest appearance suggested. It reminds us that economic recovery requires not only capital and technical solutions, but also people who dare to believe the future can be different.

In the financial world, this belief has acquired an animal of its own: the bull.

Stock market bulls expect rising prices and better times ahead. They buy when others hesitate, spotting opportunities where more cautious people see risks. In their world, every downturn is a temporary setback on the road to new records.

But for every bull, there is a bear.

The bear is the market’s sceptic, anticipating falling prices, overvalued assets, and trouble ahead. Where the bull sees an opportunity, the bear sees a bubble. Where one says “buy”, the other says “sell”.

It is tempting to regard the bear as a gloomy killjoy who spoils the mood, yet sometimes the bear sees reality most clearly.

The ancient Greeks already knew something about this, at least if we are to believe the myth of Cassandra.

Cassandra was a Trojan princess who could foresee the future but was cursed never to be believed. She could predict disasters, yet people dismissed her warnings, preferring something more reassuring.

When the Trojans brought the Trojan Horse into the city, she recognised the danger that others refused to acknowledge.

Cassandra is therefore one of history’s most tragic figures. She was right, but it did her no good. Her fate reminds us that optimism can become dangerous when it turns into an unwillingness to confront reality.

Philosophical pessimism later found one of its most consistent exponents in the German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer.

For Schopenhauer, the world was not a harmonious arrangement in which every instance of suffering ultimately served a good purpose. Instead, he saw human existence as governed by a blind, insatiable will. We constantly long for what we lack, but when we fulfil our desires, new ones soon replace them.

Life thus oscillates between desire, temporary satisfaction, and fresh disappointment.

Schopenhauer would hardly have been a popular speaker at an optimistic corporate conference. But his philosophy reminds us that a critical attitude can also be clear-sightedness.

In the modern financial world, economists such as Nouriel Roubini have occasionally played this role.

Roubini attracted international attention for his warnings about serious imbalances in the financial system ahead of the 2008 global financial crisis. His gloomy forecasts earned him the nickname ”Dr Doom”.

Not all his predictions have come true, of course. This also reminds us that someone who constantly warns of catastrophes may eventually be proven right, even if not infallible.

But in the run-up to the financial crisis, many market participants underestimated the risks, and Roubini was among those who drew attention to them.

Here we encounter the true significance of optimism and pessimism.

Optimism is needed if people are to dare to build, invest, invent and start again. Pessimists are needed so that someone notices the cracks in the foundations before the entire house collapses.

Without the optimist, we risk losing our capacity for action. Without the pessimist, we risk losing our judgement.

The curious thing is that both can also become equally unbearable.

The incurable optimist can stand amid the ruins and explain that everything is going according to plan. The incurable pessimist can stand in a flowering garden and point out that the flowers will soon wither.

And somewhere between them stands an ordinary person, newspaper in hand, trying to decide whom to believe.

The wisest approach, therefore, is neither Pangloss’s blind confidence nor Schopenhauer’s darkest conclusions, but rather a blend of Cassandra’s vigilance and Dalén’s faith in the future.

To dare to see danger without losing hope.

To understand that stock prices can fall without the world necessarily ending.

And sometimes, when the headlines have become sufficiently absurd, one starts laughing.

Epilogue – The Last Optimist

And so we return to our pink front page.

The stock market has collapsed, the bank has gone bankrupt, the Prime Minister has cancelled Christmas, and H&M has started selling holes in clothes. On the international stage, the world’s most powerful men have discovered a tenderness for one another that makes diplomats blush. Interest rates have risen to 17.99 per cent, and every stock market graph points towards the abyss.

Arthur Schopenhauer would probably have regarded the front page as a fairly restrained account of existence. Cassandra would have pointed out that she had warned everyone, but no one had listened. Nouriel Roubini might have requested another column for his forecasts.

Dr Pangloss, on the other hand, would have assured us that all of this, however peculiar it might seem, must be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

And Gustaf Dalén?

He might have taken out another of his little lapel pins bearing the words “Be an Optimist”.

Yet amid all this printed misery stands the woman with bright pink lips.

She laughs.

She laughs so hard that the paper tears, the headlines lose their power, and one catastrophe after another appears, for a brief moment, to be what it perhaps also is: part of the human spectacle we insist on calling news.

Bad news may indeed sell better than good news. But that does not mean it makes us happier. And perhaps that is precisely why we sometimes need to laugh at it.

The world does not need more catastrophes. It needs more people who dare to laugh at the headlines.

And even if laughter proves unprofitable, some corporate executive will surely be ready to announce it on the front page.

With a catastrophe headline, naturally.