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SXSW Panel: Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online
Date/Time: 9:30 a.m. on Monday, March 15
Panelists: Jay Rosen of New York University, Matt Thompson of National Public Radio, Staci D. Kramer of ContentNext Media, Tristan Harris of Apture
The Gist: Journalists treat context as an afterthought, presuming that readers know the backstory to a news article. Rather that burying context into a single sentence after a nut graph buried in the story, we need to be thinking about ways to give more attention to the bigger picture.
Takeaways: A big part of a media organization’s role to educate its readers. Presenting the news is important, but if you don’t explain how today’s news fits into the bigger picture, readers aren’t going to get much out of it. As journalists, we can presume the readers have read every word we’ve written, but that’s usually not the case. How many of use as consumers have to look up a topic on Google or Wikipedia to get a backstory before we can fully comprehend a story? Newspapers and media outlets should be finding ways to package that information and not just link to it from within a story, but stick it right there at the top of the page.
Putting context first would change how news sites look. An article is valuable today, but not tomorrow, unless you’re building upon a solid contextual base.
Matt Thompson of NPR gave an example of the financial crisis. In 2008, that was such a huge story, that the daily updates were meaningless if you didn’t go deeper. He took two days and created a site, Money Meltdown, of links to stories that gave background information to this crisis. Instead of just automatically pulling links that mentioned the crisis, each day he hand-pulled one story that he thought incorporated the day’s news into the bigger picture.
For more information and to chime in on the conversation, check out the Future of Context site that the panelists put together.
Quotes:
Thompson: “We need to flip the model. The context should be the foundation. The systemic stuff should be what you should be able to access first. The episodic stuff should be the more info link you click.”
Thompson: “We currently present context as more information, but I don’t think that the consumer desires more information. (They have) a desire for less information. We’re overloaded. We (should be thinking about how) to present the minimum you need to understand the subject.”
Harris: How do journalists find time to create more information to build context: “We need to figure out how to reuse words we’ve already written. If we can create that great infograph that explains a subject, we should be using that every time a story comes up on that topic.”
— Addie Broyles
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