@Michael-
Document clouds are certainly interesting, and if they do what we hope they will, it will make reporters' jobs easier. Unfortunately, however, they don't really help us to solve the context challenge.

I think that most participants in this blog generally agree that news consumers want not just to be informed about events happening in the world around them, but also to better understand what that event means - in other words, they want context.

In the pursuit of developing ways to add context to news, it's easy to get pursuit of that goal confused with the related but different task of locating background material. DocumentCloud and other repositories seek to offer a richer set of more easily retrieved background material.

However, no matter how easy it might be to retrieve it, the background for the individual article still has to be written and that takes more effort on the part of journalists.

But even if the background is added, readers aren't going to want to wade through essentially the same background on every article covering a related event. What they want is background that they can access if and when they want it.

That means the background information must be independent from the news articles itself. It also means you need to organize the background information by categories that are meaningful, and you have to determine which categories are meaningful to each article.

And all of this brings you right back to square one.