What's News? – Why Is It That Only Stories of Unusual, Unfortunate and Unhappy Events Get Reported in the Daily Paper?

[The] story is told of a music critic who was sent to a concert
hall in Chicago to review a performance. When he found the hall burning
down, he went home and went to bed. In the morning he explained, “There
was no story. The concert hall burned down.”

I trust these stories are apocryphal, but they serve to illustrate the difficulty of defining news.

There is some truth in the statement that good news is not news. Good
news is the stuff of life. It is what happens to most of us most of the
time. We survive. We prosper.

But if happiness was all we had to read about, we’d be very bored indeed. — Jack Smith, LA Times (1987)