Ten years ago, a Russian news website decided there was too much negativity in its pages and decided to publish only good news for a day.

The City Reporter, based in Rostov-on-Don near the eastern Ukrainian border, published headlines, such as “No disruption on roads despite snow” and “New underpass in time for Victory Day”.

Within a few hours, it lost two thirds of its readers. The experiment was swiftly curtailed, and chastened editors went back to a more doom-heavy diet of car crashes and burst water mains.

You see, people may say they want to read more good news, but the figures suggest otherwise.

At Pepshop, we decided to dig deeper into stories making headlines and, in January, we launched the Pepshop News Index.

We categorised more than 4,000 front-page stories across 20 of the biggest news websites to see what topics were hottest.

Global coverage was substantial at 17% of all stories. This is thanks to Trump, LA wildfires and plane crashes — not a great deal of positivity in there.

Politics was the biggest domestic topic, featuring in 13% of stories and, as you can imagine, there wasn’t a lot of positivity in there either.

‘Natural news’ — a catch-all term for stories that don’t fit in other categories, such as cats stuck in trees or a missing person hunt — made up 11% of the total, followed by crime/legal on 10%.

Then came some light relief, with 7% of stories featuring showbiz. Except, a lot of showbiz was related to the LA fires and politics, and even regular showbiz content featured scandal and anger.

Bad news dominates. Of course it does.

Don’t blame journalists — news outlets track eyeballs relentlessly so you can be sure all those bad news stories are in prominent positions for a reason.

Periodically, the PR world gets its collective knickers in a twist over the use of negative stories and there’s hand-wringing about the morals of putting more bad stuff into the world.

We’re in the middle of just such an episode right now thanks in no small part to the relentless, chaotic unpleasantness emanating from the US. Even I, a former tabloid editor, admit the team Trump approach has left me punch-drunk.

Like it or not, this reflects the world in which we toil, and we ignore it at our peril.

But I’ve heard the question asked: how much more bad news can people take? I’ve also heard it suggested that PRs and clients should take a stand, and lean hard into positivity — not least from Richard Edelman, who has repeatedly called for companies to invest in optimism.

I find it a frustrating take on a very real challenge. For one thing, it’s not as if PRs and their clients aren’t looking for those great positive stories anyway.

But perhaps more significantly is the risk that, in trying to emphasise the positive, we produce content that is more anodyne and less relevant.

Whatever our views on the merits of good news, the harsh truth is that evolution has hard-wired us to respond much more strongly to bad news than good — blame our ancestors, running screaming from a watering hole, pursued by a sabre-toothed tiger.

It’s called negativity bias and it helps explain why all those news outlets we surveyed in January were relying on bad news to keep their viewing figures up — if it bleeds, it leads.

Within our industry, plenty may feel it’s our duty to make the world a better place, and I applaud them. But I prefer the challenge of making it a more interesting place — and that would be good news in itself.