I hear Eric Alterman, blogger, professor, book author, in a podcast from the Woodrow Wilson School on the “The Future of News”. The session was roughly devoted to the economics of print, although very little of that go mentioned. There was on interesting passing remark by Alterman, that today’s media is mostly opinion, in loose paraphrase, to “provide context to the news.” News is everywhere, diffuse, instantaneous, and repeated in the print media, so the new journalist ventures mainly online focus on “context.”
Context is thrown back and forth in academic and semi-academic settings as a good thing. But the more it gets invoked the less I understand what it refers to.
