Much of the news we’re seeing right now is downright depressing with the threat of the coronavirus looming over us. As a journalist covering it from a local perspective, it’s been crazy seeing my community go from a bustling hub of activity with school events, community activities and more to being almost like a ghost town, where everyone is hunkering down at home hoping to escape an invisible boogeyman.

That’s why I was only too happy yesterday to go out on an assignment to the neighboring community of Bonduel and report on how the school district employees are packing up breakfasts and lunches and sending them out via school buses to the families that have hunkered down at home. The district is also continuing to teach class through virtual learning, and the food program called Backpack Blessings is expanding to help area children get more food on the weekends.

These actions are taking place to help the community weather the pandemic at a time when it seems less and less likely that we’re going to be back to normal in a short period of time. It was refreshing to be able to report something that didn’t have the words “isolation,” “quarantine” and “closure” in it.

I brought this up later in the day to a media colleague working for the local radio station as we were both covering a county board meeting where it was passing emergency legislation for the coronavirus pandemic. His response was more than a little disconcerting: “It must be nice to have time to cover such fluff.”

Hmmm. Fluff? Maybe covering all the bad news was getting to him, but it would seem that after a constant barrage of bad news with an unclear future, showcasing a community that’s finding a way to keep calm and carry on would be uplifting for people to see. It seemed extremely bizarre that he would think that covering good news is a luxury. It’s becoming a scarcity, but good news is still there.

Maybe the radio man just wants his listeners to stay depressed. If so, that’s unfortunate in its own right. We’ve already been barraged with page after page, hour after hour of news as the coronavirus is spreading like a flood, trying to sift through waves of information (and even misinformation) as the rules of day-to-day life.

Our schools have been closed down. Bars and restaurants are largely empty except to provide takeout and delivery. Sports are on hold indefinitely. Concerts and theater performances have been “postponed,” most likely cancelled. For me, personally, the UntitledTown Book and Author Festival in April in Green Bay was cancelled, and meeting with the Shawano Area Writers on a monthly basis is on hiatus as the library closed its doors.

With our communities becoming increasingly isolated and frightening, offering hope seems like the least I could do as I cover the news. I’m not alone in that thinking, it turns out.

While I was at the board meeting, the newspaper’s sports editor took the liberty of posting the Bonduel School District story online, as my busy schedule did not provide me time to do so. When I returned about an hour later, there were already more than 3,000 views on Facebook. That spiked to 9,000 in the evening, and when I woke up this morning, it was up to almost 13,000 views.

By comparison, here are some other numbers of coronavirus-related stories on the Facebook page as of this morning: the aforementioned county board meeting story, 1,372; an update on whether spring high school sports could happen, 420; casinos closing down this weekend for two weeks, 724.

This might surprise my colleague at the radio station, but people might be becoming numb to all the depressing and bad news, which explains why people were attaching themselves to the uplifting story about continuing to provide food and education. People were commenting about how wonderful it was that this was happening, especially since it was hitting the ground running right away before other area school district.

The interest is there, and in these dark and troubling times, getting a glimmer of life is more than merciful. If this kind of story is considered fluff by the jaded mediaa, I say bring on the fluff.