About the publication
The good news, taken seriously.
What's Working is constructive journalism built on the science of human flourishing — every story read not for outrage, but for what it tells us about how people thrive.
Most of the news is a faithful record of what is breaking. That record matters — but it is not the whole truth. Alongside the collapse, people are still helping each other, building things that last, and finding their way back to hope. Those stories are just as real, and just as worth reporting. What's Working exists to report them with the same rigor the rest of the news reserves for what is going wrong.
We are not a feel-good clipping service. The difference is the lens. Every story we publish is read through an evidence-based framework for wellbeing, so that “good news” becomes something measurable: not just pleasant, but nourishing.
The framework
A flourishing ontology, not a vibe
What separates this from any other “good news” feed is the analysis underneath it. We read each story through three evidence-based frameworks — two from positive psychology, one from journalism itself:
- The PERMA model
- Martin Seligman's five pillars of wellbeing — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. We score where a story lands across all five.
- VIA character strengths
- The 24 strengths — courage, kindness, perseverance, hope and more — that show up when people are at their best. We name the ones a story puts on display.
- Constructive journalism
- The reporting tradition that adds solutions, context, and a way forward to the facts — rigorous coverage that informs without leaving you hopeless. It's the standard we hold every story to.
The result is a publication where every story comes with a reading: not just what happened, but what it reveals about how humans flourish — and one small practice you might carry into your own day.
The founder
Zack Prager
What's Working is created by Zack Prager, who works at the intersection of technology, wellbeing science, and human flourishing. He holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under Martin Seligman, and worked on the technical side of the World Well-Being Project at Penn's Positive Psychology Center alongside Angela Duckworth.
For roughly a decade he has built technology meant to serve people rather than extract from them — phone-free zones (Screen Zombie / Ransomly), reciprocal gratitude (Gratitude Bucket), breath-based interruptions to mindless scrolling (Pause Therapy), and AI that offers therapeutic support while you read the news (Want to Talk About It?). This publication is the same idea pointed at journalism: designing the environment, not scolding the reader, to make flourishing the easier path.
A little evidence, each morning, that the world is also getting better.