Though the western journalism has taken the doctrine ″Bad news is good news″ as a guideline for practice for a long time, constructive journalism is a new approach to how the journalists report news, which brings fresh wind into the academic community and the press circle. However, the concept of constructive journalism is not unchangeable. In the process of its development, similar concepts include positive journalism, peace journalism, restorative narrative, expected news, solutions journalism, etc. The academic community has not reached an agreement on the definition and operating principles concerning the above six categories of journalism, which will inevitably cause confusion in journalism practice and research, so they need to be sorted out, clarified, and defined. The analysis of constructive journalism from the perspective of mapping knowledge domain, based on the Web of Science core collection, shows that the study on the above six categories of journalism has gone through three stages from inactivity to activity, and to concurrent growth. Among the six categories of journalism, peace journalism, constructive journalism and solutions journalism are more likely be used and cited in bibliographical records. Although constructive journalism appeared later than others, it has attracted much attention because of its inter-disciplinary and practical value. The distribution of authors’ countries and cooperative researches in this field indicate that the emergence of different news concepts is closely related to the international situation and the political, economic and cultural factors of different countries. Although studies on constructive journalism research are growing fast, the variety of research institutions and their wide distribution have given rise to certain disputes and differences. Although a group of scholars have tried to construct a concept of journalism that can get rid of the influence of ″American Centralism″, the result has hardly changed. That means the concept of news generated from the United States is still the core of journalism, with European and American countries as the principal part and developing countries as the auxiliary in the academic community. When comparing the concepts of the six categories of journalism, researchers have attempted to employ positive psychology theories and methods to unify and cover the positive elements of all the other concepts and news categories in an effort to build their own systems, which, conversely, resulted in blurred boundaries, broader domains and weaker theoretical interpretability. In the process of switch from the old terms to new terms, constructive journalism researchers have tried to change the situation that the media ″enjoy power but bear no responsibility″. First of all, constructive journalism needs to be guided by positive psychology and simultaneously focus on the positive follow-through of negative news with an aim to cover a more diverse social background. Secondly, constructive news attaches importance to adopting multiple concerns and voices and promotes the active transformation of journalists from ″gatekeeper″ to ″promoters″. Thus, constructive news reconstructs the relationship between news and audiences, inspires and guides the public to participate in public affairs and promotes the formation of positive energy in promoting social development. Thirdly, constructive news provides an effective way for ″contextualized″ reports, which breaks the limitation of the regional conflicts of peace news and of community groups in restorative narrative, inspires journalism to expand its scope and pushes local news to gradually go global. Fourthly, constructive news combines the problem-solving orientation of planned news and the future orientation of expected news. It also connects the past, the present and the future and takes a positive stance to turn difficulties into prosperity, thus improving the effectiveness of news communication. As the saying goes, ″Stones from other hills may serve to polish the jade of this one″. The theories and practices of western constructive news can undoubtedly bring new thinking, positioning and cultivation to Chinese journalism theory and its practice. However, the reform of Chinese journalism and communication must start from China’s domestic situation a global perspective. It needs to find within Chinese traditional culture the theoretical resources on the communication of harmony and positive energy. It needs to find its own direction in the contemporary news practice under the guidance of ″positive reporting as main direction″. Chinese reform in news communication also needs to critically borrow ideas from the news research and practice of constructive news and even from the other five types and actively explore the theory and practice of constructive news with Chinese characteristics.