Meet ‘The Happy Newspaper’ creator Emily Coxhead

Meet ‘The Happy Newspaper’ creator Emily Coxhead

Graphic Designer Emily Coxhead said reading about tragedy after tragedy began to take a toll on her mental health — so she created a newspaper that only reports happy stories.

» Subscribe to NowThis: http://go.nowth.is/News_Subscribe

Meet ‘The Happy Newspaper’ creator who only publishes uplifting stories.

 

Emily Coxhead: It’s a real newspaper which some people don't realize. It's a real, 32-page newspaper and it comes out quarterly and it's basically a platform to share all the good things happening in the world, things that we don't necessarily hear about.

Just feel-good stories but also real positive changes that happen in the world that we might not hear about as well.

Graphic designer Emily Coxhead lives in North West England. She was inspired to create The Happy Newspaper after feeling overwhelmed by the 24/7 news cycle.

Coxhead: The two things that I noticed were impacting my mental health in a negative way were news and social media. So yeah I think it was the sort of bombardment of that. I just thought, if there was something I can do to sort of shift this slightly and just turn on its head a little bit.

Coxhead says others told her they stopped subscribing to newspapers because of how the news was making them feel Coxhead: I realized it wasn't just me and I thought, well, if I can do this and it was a bit of a novelty thing to start with. It wasn’t supposed to be, well, I wasn’t expecting all of this. With a team of volunteers, Coxhead has published 13 quarterly issues to date. The paper has nearly 7,000 subscribers in 33 countries across the globe. After bringing in its initial funding on Kickstarter, Coxhead says paid subscriptions have made the paper sustainable.

Coxhead: Around the Manchester [bombing] we had a school teacher from one of the schools there who messaged and said, 'please, can we get some happy newspapers because the children are all distraught' because they'd lost some of the students. And actually more recently, we had a teacher from the Christchurch school in New Zealand who messaged and said, ‘we're just— the children are incredible and so strong but there were all just in— like we don't know what to do, and we want to cover the walls in happy news stories. Stuff like that is just- that is why I'm doing it.

 The above content was originally published on YouTube 


Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published