Let me put this in context for you

Context.

This is my underlying goal as a columnist, and this is a crucial yet often overlooked element in journalism, I believe.

How does a news item affect you? What does it mean to you? Why should you care?

Aren’t these the unspoken questions you ask while shuffling through your print newspaper or surfing through your online version? Otherwise, the news would simply be an ever-swirling storm of items, incidents, and accidents with no real meaning to you.

Yet one reader recently told me that he doesn’t need any context with his news. He simply and strictly needs the news “straight-up, like a shot of Jack Daniels, not watered down like a frilly wine cooler,” he colorfully noted.

The dictionary defines context as “the connection of words, coherence, and the circumstances surrounding an act or event.”

These circumstances can be any number of things, from your place of residence and racial demographic to your political or religious sensibilities. This is the prism you view the world through, your personal kaleidoscope of perspectives and perceptions.

Yet some “surrounding circumstances” are more immediate than others, I’ve noticed.

For example, I always find it interesting that people typically have an acute concern regarding accidents or incidents that happen near their home. But the further away the accident or incident takes place, the less they seem to care.

For instance, a fatal four-alarm fire that breaks out, say, two miles from our home means so much more to us than a fire that breaks out 200 miles away – even though neither fire is remotely close to us. Why is this? Didn’t a house burn down at both locations? Didn’t someone die in each fire?

Well yeah, we reply, but one happened in, say, Portage, versus Pennsylvania.

Newspapers, of course, cater to these contextual circumstances by playing up “local, local, local” – our newsroom mantra – while downplaying other news from distant regions. It’s not that the other news isn’t important. It’s just not as important.

There are surely many readers, such as the gentleman I spoke with, who claim to want only the news, straight-up, undiluted, and without any kind of twist. But without context – without meaning – what good is it to us anyway?

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