In the scholarly literature on contemporary news media, one of the biggest themes is that they devalue context - the 'how did we get here' questions. This is especially acute in the realm of TV news, where soundbite slots and 15-second stories prevail. But it can also characteristic of online news, where the flow of stories is so much more voluminous and quick.

Daylife, a new news service/portal launched today, attempts to get around some of these problems. Most interesting to me are the devices that allow you to see various contexts for a particular story, such as photo feeds, key quotations and an ingenious timeline feature.The images are high quality licensed ones from Getty. In this era of fragmentation and endlessly customisable content (see Netvibes), I also like the idea of editors picking the front page, as well as automating the integration of good sources to produce something high quality, coherent yet still pluralistic.It's way ahead of Google News in that regard.

I can see Daylife becoming very popular among students and teachers, but will it gain a wider user base? Is it going to put a dent in the dominant modes of news production and consumption, offline or online?