The PINF team endeavours to bring some new year’s cheer this week, sharing our reading list for some hopeful inspiration.

If you’re reading this, then you made it through ‘Blue Monday’ - well done! I’m kidding of course, as we all know, this was an extraordinarily successful concept created by salespeople to sell holidays in the January sales. It was capitalism all along!
However, there certainly are plenty of reasons to feel a little bleak this week, be it stormy weather, stormy politics or a lack of Dark & Stormies (how’s your dry January going?).
So, the PINF team have put together our short and sweet list for some hopeful reading/listening this week. We hope it brings you a little joy.
As I write this, I've interrupted my fortnightly trawl through Private Eye. It's a real pleasure to read the magazine from cover to cover. Its biting satire, pungent humour and investigative journalism have been constant companions over the last forty years or so. Private Eye always makes me think and opens my eyes to what's really going on.
Jaldeep Katwala, Network Manager
The risks presented by Big Tech — especially corporate ownership of the ‘digital public square’ — have never been more apparent. I liked this essay by Nick Couldry - based on his book The Space of the World (part one of a coming trilogy!) - it gives me hope because I think we’re close to defining the problem accurately, and the solutions are coming in to view. There’s a great deal more work to be done to test some solutions and grow a democratic media alternative. But we can do it!
More generally, as the danger-to-life warnings appear as Storm Éowyn rolls in, and the US looks to withdraw from the Paris agreement, it’s tough to feel optimistic on the climate emergency (and thus the future of everything). I read some Octavia Butler last year, whose Parables books, written in the 1990s, are eerily prescient and predict a pretty grim future. But I also read The Ministry for the Future, from which I gleaned some hope!
Joe Mitchell, Deputy Director
Very few people are thinking more about the past, present and future of journalism than Brian Reed’s excellent team behind the Question Everything Podcast. The (roughly) fortnightly pod dives into hot topics like trust and polarisation, attacks on media and AI. The first episode hooked me straight away, with Brian taking an excoriating look at his high profile project, S-Town. It’s honest and critical without being navel-gazing, and gives me hope in the profession’s ability to evolve and adapt to meet current challenges.
Outwith news media specifically, a book that recently left me with an enormous sense of hope and positivity was Sally Rooney’s most recent novel Intermezzo. A friend put it best when she said that Rooney ‘literally told me WHY I should live’. It’s a beautiful novel, her best yet, and has so much to say about the power of human connection, grief and belief.
Beckie Shuker, Campaign and Communications Manager
This article on The Tulsa Local News Initiative was in the Nieman Lab's newsletter this morning and although based on US local news, chimes with the work that PINF is doing here in the UK. I particularly liked the intro story of the young kid who read about a scholarship program in his local newspaper, that led him to a career in journalism and back to be managing editor of that same local newspaper. It’s encouraging to read of efforts in US to counter the Trump/Musk effect.
Wendy Collinson, Administrator
I’m enjoying reading Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed. It’s about the power of diverse groups to come up with new ideas and a powerful riposte to people who criticise the idea of diverse recruitment. As well as all the moral arguments in favour of diversity – fairness, equality, justice – Syed comes up with a powerful business case. From the CIA’s failure to anticipate 9/11 to English men’s football’s failures in international tournaments, he shows how homogenous groups of people can slip into groupthink, whereas more diverse groups will correct each other’s blind spots and see possibilities that weren’t otherwise apparent.
Syed argues that the key to high-performing teams is cognitive diversity – people with different ways of thinking. As he notes, demographic diversity – differences in gender, ethnicity – will often create cognitive diversity, because people’s lived experiences shape how they think. So, in practice, it’s important to build teams of people with different experiences and different ways of thinking, so that together we can become more than the sum of our parts.
I think that’s also important when we think about the media. A news industry that’s composed of very similar people won’t see what’s really going on in the world and will lose touch with the rest of the society. But an industry made up of really diverse people will be energetic, innovative and successful.
Jonathan Heawood, Executive Director
One thing that made me feel positive this week was the announcement of the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival programme. I read recently that rewatching films or series is comforting and stress relieving because it removes uncertainty. There’s comfort in the familiarity, so it can be a nice thing to do if you’re homesick or stressed. There is a retrospective strand in the festival offering the chance to see back catalogue classics on the big screen for free. What isn’t to love about that!
Zoe Greenfield, Business Manager (Zoe is also on the Board of the Glasgow Film Theatre!)