Newsless.org

Many people use the terms “news” and “journalism” interchangeably. But what is news? I think most folks would say it means what’s new, accounts of the latest developments affecting some corner of the world.

Until recently, newspaper editors defined news as “important developments over the past 24 hours.” Editors of newsmagazines might expand that time horizon by a few days; Web editors will contract it to within a few hours. But there’s no escaping the time-bounded nature of “news.”

My understanding of journalism is broader. To me, journalism is the constant effort to deliver a truer picture of the world as it is. The “latest developments” provide one lens through which to capture that picture. And as long as journalism was primarily delivered by static media, that lens made perfect sense.

The Web, however, makes possible other ways of delivering that picture of our evolving world. It allows us to shirk the tyranny of recency and place more emphasis on context - the information that often gets buried beneath the news.

The title of this blog is a provocative misnomer. I don’t think news is going anywhere anytime soon, and I certainly think it remains a useful way of hooking our attention into the context surrounding the latest developments. But I do want to end the headlock news has placed on journalism. For all our handwringing and speculation, our conferences, our books, etc., news is as old as humanity and will survive us all. What ails in journalism - and what we have the opportunity to fix - is context.

I want to hear much, much less about the future of news, and much more about the future of context. I want to shift the focus of our books and conferences from how we’ll deliver the latest developments to how we’ll help our audiences better understand the state of our world.

For the next nine months, I’ll be at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, attempting to lay out a vision of a news website centered around context rather than time. I’ll be blogging my explorations and discoveries here, and welcoming your insights. Journalism has a moment of great opportunity before it. Let’s figure out how to rise to the occasion.

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