I generally agree with the goals of Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris’s Future of Context project.

But at the same time, I don’t quite get it. Concern for context in journalism has been around since before the Hutchins Commission, which in 1947 wrote: “The media should provide a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning.”

So, what’s different today? The Web, obviously. It provides great opportunities for context and background.

But, then again, so do books, and they’re not new.

But, then then, the most oft-cited “explainer” I’m aware of is a radio program, This American Life’s “Giant Pool of Money” (which lived up to the hype).

I’m left with a couple of questions:

Does “context” mean something different now such that Web provides it better than “old” media could?

If explainers are so important to our understanding, why do we need newspapers? Even after we understand the context, what good is a daily report when a more infrequent summary could provide the same, while linking it to the context we’ve already absorbed or the context we don’t know yet? (As a commenter on PressThink notes, explainers are not simple.)

Has the meaning of “context” changed such that the time and effort normally considered required to understand an issue in context is no longer applies? If news organizations’ try to provide the news quickly and in easily-digestable forms, should we expect them to provide context?