About Good News For The UK

Why does this exist?

Let's be honest: the British news cycle can be an absolute punishment. Outrage, scandal, clickbait, and the kind of relentless negativity that makes you want to bin your phone and move to a cave. The Daily Mail and The Sun have been fuelling a national anxiety disorder for decades, and frankly, I'd had enough.

There is genuinely good stuff happening in this country, every single day. Scientists making breakthroughs. Communities rallying together. Wildlife coming back. Volunteers showing up. Kids doing extraordinary things. Local councils, charities, neighbours, and small businesses quietly making their corner of the UK a bit better. Most of it goes completely unreported, or gets buried under the latest manufactured controversy.

This site exists to fix that. Good News For The UK is a fully automated aggregator that hunts down positive UK stories from trusted sources, filters out the noise, and presents them in a clean, cheerful format with no adverts, no subscription walls, no tracking pixels, and no hot takes. It is, deliberately, a small public good on the internet.

Who's behind it?

Hello. I'm Karl Dawkins, the one person running this whole operation. By day I'm Director of Technology at a London TV production company, where I've been keeping cameras, servers, and editors talking to each other for nearly twenty years. By night, weekends, and the bits of lunch breaks I can rescue, I tinker with side projects like this one. My house is a zoo, my family puts up with me, and I genuinely enjoy seeing what you can stand up on a £3-a-month VPS if you're stubborn enough.

Good News For The UK is unapologetically a community project. There's no business model, no growth plan, no investor deck. I'm not trying to build a brand or pivot into a startup. I just think the country is better than its newsfeed suggests, and that a tiny corner of the web showing the good bits is a useful thing to put into the world. If it cheers up your morning scroll, brilliant. If it nudges you to share something kind with a mate, even better. That's the whole point.

Have a read of my LinkedIn if you want to verify there's an actual human behind this, with actual decades of running real infrastructure, before you trust anything I've built.

Where do the stories come from?

Stories are pulled automatically from a curated selection of RSS feeds and communities including the BBC, The Guardian, ITV News, Positive News, and the ever-excellent r/GoodNewsUK on Reddit, which was the original inspiration for this whole project. Credit where it's due: that subreddit was already doing this by hand, one upvote at a time. This site is the automated cousin.

Every story goes through an AI pipeline before it appears on the site. The AI reads the article, checks it's genuinely positive, rewrites the headline into plain, honest English (goodbye clickbait), generates a concise summary, assigns it to a category, and gives it a feel-good score out of ten. If the score is too low, or the story turns out to be negative despite a misleading headline, it gets binned automatically. If you want the gory detail on which models I'm using and why I keep swapping them, there's a whole separate AI Modelling page for that.

What's the feel-good score?

Every story gets a score from 1 to 10, where 10 means you'll probably want to ring someone and tell them about it, and 1 means it technically has a silver lining if you squint hard enough. Stories scoring below 4 are rejected entirely. Anything from 7 upwards goes straight to publication. You'll see the score on each story so you can judge for yourself how hard it's going to make you smile.

Published stories also get re-checked after the fact. A cron job picks already-published articles and asks the AI to score them again, cold, against the same rubric. Those second opinions are advisory, because the model can be a bit trigger-happy; big downgrades go into my review tools rather than quietly disappearing from the site.

Can I follow along on Bluesky?

Yes. The very best stories, those scoring 9 or 10 out of ten, are posted automatically to Bluesky. If you'd rather get your good news fix in a social feed than by checking the site, give me a follow at @goodnewsfortheuk.bsky.social. Only the cream of the crop makes it through, so it's a fairly cheerful corner of the internet.

Is this AI-generated rubbish?

The headlines and summaries are AI-rewritten, but the underlying stories are real journalism from real sources. The AI's job is to strip out the clickbait, write a clear headline that actually reflects the story, and summarise it for you. Not to fabricate anything. Every story links directly to the original source so you can read the full article yourself, and I'd encourage you to.

Think of it less as "AI-generated content" and more as having a very efficient sub-editor who works at 3am and doesn't take holidays.

It's also not left entirely to its own devices. There's human oversight in the loop, and that human is me: stories can be reviewed, corrected, or removed if anything slips through that shouldn't. The AI does the heavy lifting; I keep an eye on it.

What does it cost to run, and who pays for it?

The whole thing runs on a £3-a-month VPS, which is a pleasing sentence to type. The AI costs are kept deliberately low by leaning hard on free tiers and quietly retrying against backup models when one runs out of quota. What's left is generously covered by the site's sponsor. A huge thank you to ThunderLizard.co.uk, without whose support the AI bills would be coming out of the biscuit tin.

No ads. No tracking. No selling your data, because I'm not collecting any. If the site ever needs more money to keep going, I'll say so plainly on this page first, and the answer will not be "we've added pop-ups".