The New Stack: Context

I launched Context with the goal of introducing classic, NPR-style, radio-form storytelling to a podcast audience. Before Context, listeners were overwhelmed by a deluge of shows produced by folks who simply poked “Record” before starting their own unscripted conversations. Personally, I can’t stand listening to something I wouldn’t be able to stand reading, if it were printed.

So with memories of “Science Friday” and the original Ted Koppel “Nightline” in mind, I created a format where each show concentrated on an issue in the open source software and infrastructure development realm, where the answers or solutions were undecided, and the debate was balanced. Context was not a forum for sponsored content, unlike other programs produced by and for The New Stack. Rather, this was media that dove into an undecided issue, with balanced experts and varying perspectives.

Later that year, as I appeared in public for computing conferences, folks would come up to me to say there’s something familiar about me, but they couldn’t put their finger on it. Finally, at one open source conference, a fellow gasped and shouted, “I know! You’re the Guy with the Voice!” In some circles, the catch-phrase stuck.

The original Context is one of the creations I’m proudest of, over nearly four decades in this business. It framed the problems we face in information technology in exactly the way I’ve always imagined them: as serious dilemmas with two or more possible solutions, and the path forward not always being clear.

Not everyone understood this, from the perspective of content strategy. Brands and service providers prefer to project themselves as “solutions providers.” In sponsored podcasts, they get the opportunity to portray their solutions as having already solved one or more dilemmas, essentially unchallenged.

But content strategy is about presenting an audience with the information they want to see and hear. Sure, they’re looking for solutions, but framed in the context of the problems they themselves are facing. They’re looking for a little empathy here — for an acknowledgment that these problems are hard, and they’re not stupid for believing so. Audiences gravitate toward stories of challenges at the scale they presently perceive them to be. When a provider frames solutions as already solved, or at least solvable with the flick of a switch, the scale of the problem becomes diminished, as do their opinions of themselves and the situations they face.

I’ll always remember the comments from folks who told me how much they liked Context in its original form. I heard more than once, “You get it. You actually get it.”