Transmedia stories and the future of context in news at SXSW

I have to be honest: I was pretty disappointed by most of the journalism-specific panels I attended at SXSWi. It’s not that the info wasn’t good or vital, it’s that I expected a lot more forward-looking or cutting-edge stuff. I blogged about a particularly disappointing one (not so much the panel’s fault, I think, as much as it was the tone set by the questions), but that was fairly typical. The best sessions that I could use were in non-journalism arenas such as gaming and marketing.

One panel I have been looking forward to actually exceeded my high expectations. “Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online” with Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris was everything I was looking for here at SXSWi: important questions, big ideas, and a focus on discussion and solutions. No teeth-gnashing over stale questions like “Will bloggers replace journalists?” and other such important chatter from 2005.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel and recap this thing. Elise Hu at the Texas Tribune did an excellent liveblog summary of the panel and discussion, and if you want to hack the raw tweetstream check out what the audience was doing with the #futureofcontext hashtag. What I want to do here is briefly sketch out the argument and where my mind has been going with this since the panel spoke.

Rosen had the best visual description of the context problem facing our journalism today. Imagine, he said, downloading a software update to your computer for a program that isn’t installed on your machine. The absurdity of such a situation should be self-evident. The update does the user no good because it’s an add-on to a program that doesn’t exist on the machine. It’s a waste of the user’s time, it’s a waste of resources, and it doesn’t accomplish the mission set out for the software patch. Read more