A friend once explained to me that in her journalism course, she was taught that bad news is news - people are not interested in hearing that a store was not robbed, no car crashes occurred and nobody was shot. There are two hypotheses about human interest in bad news: evolution favored the genes that worried about predators and therefore survived and news is what is unusual. In fact, life goes on without major incident most of the time.
In tragic times, the usual reverses. In Haiti, where tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands depending on the report, have died, the news focuses on each survivor pulled from the devastation. Suddenly, good news is news because it is so rare. This is bad.
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Bad news is news, but not the only news. News is whatever is happening of interest to readers. Sometimes it's bad news and sometimes good. It's never news that the sun rose this morning. In such an event as earthquakes, both bad and good news happen, each in contrast to the other. Even Shakespeare put comedy in his tragedies.
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