A difficult news story can leave a reader feeling helpless, particularly when the problem described is large, distant, and clearly beyond any individual's ability to solve alone, which is a common and understandable reaction to news covering genuinely large-scale problems. What sustains this, more than anything, is simply not stopping too early.
Turning that feeling into one small, concrete action, a donation, a message to a representative, sharing accurate information with someone who would benefit from it, tends to counter the helplessness more effectively than simply reading further coverage of the same underlying problem, however thorough that additional coverage might be.
The action does not need to be large enough to solve the problem outright, since expecting that would set an impossible standard for any individual response, only large enough to convert passive concern into something closer to active, if modest, participation in addressing it. It asks for patience rather than talent, which most people already have in reserve.