You Are What You Read

(Paperback)

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Do you ever feel overwhelmed and powerless after watching the news Does it make you feel sad about the world, without much hope for its future Take a breath the world is not as bad as the headlines would have you believe. In You Are What You Read, campaigner and researcher Jodie Jackson helps us understand how our current twenty-four-hour news cycle is produced, who decides what stories are selected, why the news is mostly negative and what effect this has on us as individuals and as a society. Combining the latest research from psychology, sociology and the media, she builds a powerful case for including solutions into our news narrative as an antidote to the negativity bias. You Are What You Read is not just a book, it is a manifesto for a movement: it is not a call for us to ignore the negative but rather a call to not ignore the positive. It asks us to change the way we consume the news and shows us how, through our choices, we have the power to improve our media diet, our mental health and just possibly the world.

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The subject of media consumption is more timely than ever in the era of fake news and social media burnout. Jodie Jackson is an expert on the psychological and social impact of the news, speaking regularly at media conferences and universities. The book was supported at the crowdfunding stage by influential voices in the field: Steven Pinker, Ola Rosling (author of Factfulness and co-founder of Gapminder), David Bordstein (co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network), Jean Philip De Tender (Director Media at the European Broadcast Association) among others. For fans of Factfulness by Hans Rosling, The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. The author will be available for events around publication.

Author Bio

Jodie Jackson is an author, researcher and campaigner, and a partner at The Constructive Journalism Project. She holds a master's degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of East London where she investigated the psychological impact of the news, and she is a regular speaker at media conferences and universities. She lives in London. @jacksonjodie21