The Good Newspaper

Spiro Agnew, among others, has observed that the nation's media are dominated by doom and crisis; good news is no news, it seems. Now, for the Vice President and other frustrated optimists, there is hope--in the form of a forthcoming Sacramento weekly called The Aquarian Times, billed by Publisher Bill Bailey, a former adman, as "America's first good-news newspaper." The Times will ban ads for cigarettes and skin flicks. The first issue, ready next week, will list stocks--but only those that have gone up. The lead story will report that in the U.S. last year 196,459,483 people did not commit a crime, 4,896,720 college students took no part in riots or demonstrations, and 201,489,710 Americans did not use illegal drugs.

Bailey may have trouble keeping his good-news columns full. Saturday Review frequently tried a "Good News" section in the early 1950s, but the Rev. Dr. Donald Harrington, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Manhattan who was the column's last editor, says it folded for lack of "easy access" to the kind of upbeat items he wanted.

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