Tell Me Something Good
We need to stop leaving our audience stranded. Especially if we care about democracy.

That’s it, that’s all I wanted to say. You can go back to whatever you were doing, unless it involves leaving your audience stranded. Then please just stop.
Here’s an explanation so you have something else to do.
The Stranded Audience
First, we need to get the unpleasant business out of the way of actually looking at how to leave our audience helpless. The thing we shouldn’t do1.
A good example is news. While journalists would rightly argue that they are doing an important job of informing the public, news is notorious for feeding us bad events whose resolution we are unlikely to learn, even if we wanted to. This paints a much darker picture than the world has to offer, where crime, suffering and death are a constant.
But I’m not talking about normal news. The “x happened to y or x was done by y in place z at time a” kind of news that we can shrug off as long as it doesn’t affect us. I’m talking about storified journalism, by which I mean news that is dramatised like a story to evoke emotion.
Done well (through the lens of storytelling), storified journalism does not simply inform the public about what happened. It makes us feel what happened. This quality of storytelling can be very useful, for example, in making science more engaging2. But in the case of standard storified journalism, which dramatises a problem, it mostly does one thing: make us feel bad. For some people, news is too depressing to consume. Yet in a democracy it is potentially vital for everyone to be able to receive and understand news.
At Anyone’s Mercy
What is the message of such storified journalism? Most of the time, news is about a problem. The journalist tells us about something in our ordinary world that we did not know about. Something problematic that we need to fix. In other words, they open up a knowledge gap in the real world. This is very similar to the work of a scientist. And it is the textbook example of the inciting incident that starts a story.
Mufasa dies in The Lion King.
From a storytelling perspective, news is stuck at the beginning of what may or may not turn out to be a story. The setup is made, the desire to solve the problem is created by the audience’s mirror experience. And then – it ends.
This leaves the audience with an unresolved problem that they feel they desperately need to solve, but no guidance on how to do so.
Incomplete stories in art make people angry. We are left wanting. Incomplete stories in life do the same. We are angry but helpless in the face of problems that seem beyond our control.
During the Covid pandemic, people stopped looking to the scientists for answers because they could not finish their story to their satisfaction. All the people wanted was to know how to protect themselves and their loved ones. All they got was a description of a problem, and no idea what to do about it.
Simba does not know what to do when Mufasa dies. He even tells us so.
It is easy for anyone to pick up these stories and twist them to their own advantage. Extremists offer happy endings everywhere. If only we would give up our democracy, our solidarity and almost all our values that have the inconvenience of making us feel bad because bad things happen in the world and we don’t know how to solve them.
Scar tells Simba to leave his family and friends. And Simba learns to live in this new world, denying his past. Hakuna matata.
I’m not saying that storified news is what destroys democracy. But given the influence of the media on our perception of the world, I think it has an impact.
What now?
I don’t think news needs to be storified. Until there is a whole story to tell.
Storytelling is about getting people interested and keeping them interested. It makes sense when what we are communicating is old news that has found its resolution. There is an ending, a lesson to be learnt. In fact, it seems to me to be the intuitive answer to the problem of how to communicate good news. As well as to the problem of not communicating how something is resolved because it would be “old news”. One could let people tag news they are interested in so they can follow developments until the final story appears.
But why use storytelling when what we are communicating is news that provides its own entry point by being new, and keeps the right people engaged simply because it is of interest to them. All we need to do to get them to consume the news is to make that concern clear. And let go of the fantasy that we need to reach everyone.
Storytelling can make our writing more accessible and engaging, but this can be achieved by applying some of its fundamentals, such as clarity of writing and structure. Empathy – the key part of storytelling that makes us feel what is happening – is not necessary when information is sufficient.
But storytelling is also used to change people’s behaviour. And that can be a reason to use storytelling for news. When people need to act. If we can give them a roadmap on how to become the hero of the story and create their own happy ending. Such a roadmap includes actions like “People who support cause x are signing the petition you will find if you click on this link”. Or whatever action we feel is appropriate based on our communication.
This is where Nala comes in and tells Simba her story. That while his world may seem nice and free of trouble, those he used to care about are suffering. And that he must act and defeat Scar to have a chance of a happy ending.
If we cannot provide a roadmap, we must not leave our audience stranded at the beginning of a story, wanting.
We Need Endings – Happy Endings
I’ve mostly talked about journalism (and not the constructive one). But there are countless examples of issues both in politics and science that can leave people feeling helpless. And no matter what we communicate, if we use storytelling, it is never a good idea to leave our audience in the state of uncertainty created by the inciting incident without providing a means to resolve it.
How would you have felt if The Lion King had ended after Nala’s speech and Simba’s refusal to help?
Nor, for the sake of completeness, is it a good idea to leave an audience with only the information about what doesn’t work to solve a problem. That is what we do when we tell a story with an unhappy ending.
What if Simba had died like his father? What if Scar had won? Well, we know only too well, because both the hyenas and Lion Queen Sarabi have told us. Everyone would have starved. Sounds a bit like the worst-case scenario that climate science has to offer, doesn’t it?
The thing about happy endings is that they tell us the worst that could happen, and then tell us how to avoid it. In the business of the real world (news, science, education, …) we need happy endings to solve our problems. Or at least we need a hopeful perspective.
We need Nala. We need Rafiki. And we need Simba to return.
If we can’t find a happy ending (yet), no matter how hard we try, we shouldn’t be telling a story. We must not leave our audience feeling helpless.
Photo by Ulrike Langner on Unsplash