What happens when the news people consume starts shaping not just what they know, but how they feel about the world?
In this episode of Peek Inside, Arky Jones speaks with Samuel Brooks about human behaviour, media, fear, algorithms and the growing competition for attention. Brooks shares how his own relationship with news and social media gradually became more stressful, eventually pushing him to rethink the way he consumed information and build Rally, a positive-news aggregator designed to act as a counterweight to overwhelmingly negative coverage.
The conversation is not simply about avoiding bad news. It becomes a broader discussion about media bias, personal agency, algorithmic influence and whether people can deliberately choose a healthier information environment without simply creating another echo chamber.
How Negative News Can Shape Attention and Behaviour
Brooks traces part of his thinking back to his work in digital publishing. He describes becoming disillusioned with an environment where performance data could encourage stories to become more sensational while losing some of their nuance. At the same time, he found that consuming news and social media outside work was not helping him relax. Instead, he felt increasingly caught in what he describes as an atmosphere of ongoing stress.
Climate change became one of the issues that forced him to examine that pattern more closely. Brooks says he had reached a point where the subject was creating an almost constant sense of catastrophe. Rather than abandon the issue, he began actively seeking more detailed and sometimes contradictory perspectives.
For him, that process did not mean deciding that serious problems were unimportant. Instead, he felt that complex issues were often presented in an all-or-nothing way, while reality could be more complicated.
Arky challenges the conversation by asking what happens when people replace one biased information stream with another. If negativity can distort perception, could deliberately positive media do the same thing in the opposite direction?
That question sits at the centre of much of the episode.
Rally, Positive News and the Problem of Personalised Algorithms
Brooks explains that Rally began as a tool for himself. He wanted an information feed that reflected a more positive angle rather than leaving every decision to existing social media and news algorithms. Over time, that personal experiment developed into a public news aggregator.
He is careful, however, not to present Rally as a replacement for all other news. In his view, it works better as a counterweight. People will still encounter difficult or important stories elsewhere; Rally is intended to surface the positive stories that can easily disappear beneath more alarming headlines.
Arky presses him on curation, bias and safeguards. If an algorithm is deciding what counts as positive, who decides where the boundaries sit? Brooks acknowledges the problem. He describes Rally as still evolving and says he manually reviews stories, allows users to flag content and is working towards clearer systems for assessing sources and political bias.
The discussion becomes particularly interesting when Brooks considers highly personalised feeds. In theory, giving every user an algorithm tailored perfectly to their preferences sounds empowering. In practice, he worries that extreme personalisation may be part of what has made online spaces more polarised in the first place.
Can People Take Back Control of Their Attention?
Later in the conversation, the focus shifts from the design of Rally to the everyday choices people make with their attention.
Brooks says he uses Rally first thing in the morning, describing the habit as “joy scrolling” rather than doomscrolling. For him, the first few minutes after waking are particularly important because they arrive before work, messages, social media and other people begin competing for attention.
He does not claim that a positive-news feed solves everything. Brooks explicitly places it alongside other parts of his life rather than treating it as a cure-all. The broader idea is simply to become more conscious of what enters the mind first and how much influence outside systems should be allowed to have.
Arky takes that idea further, suggesting that consuming something positive could become a deliberate ritual rather than another passive scrolling habit. He raises the possibility of pausing after a story, reflecting on it and turning information consumption into a more intentional experience.
By the end of the episode, the conversation is less about whether positive news is inherently better and more about agency. Algorithms, headlines and platforms compete aggressively for attention, but people still have some choices about what they consume, what they question and what deserves mental space.
For anyone interested in media psychology, doomscrolling, digital wellbeing, positive news or the influence of algorithms on human behaviour, the full conversation offers a thoughtful exchange rather than a simple answer.
Watch the full conversation on Peek Inside:
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