Conversations about the future of news often get stuck on a few main topics. The search for new funding streams. How to effectively use social media. Bickering between schools old and new. We're not weighing in on those debates. 

The reason we're starting this blog at ProPublica is because we're most concerned with accountability reporting going forward. People are not suffering from a lack of news. Morning to night, they're barraged by information from tweets, radio, 24-hour cable news, blogs, aggregators, and traditional media. At any moment, there's a tidal wave of information out there, constantly getting updated. What's lacking is enough context to make sense of it all. To borrow a metaphor from this Poynter piece, it's hard to drink from a firehose.

So the job of this blog is to do some of that filtering for you--and to connect the dots: To riff off what's happening in the news, by explaining things that are complex, to match blips of news to deeper context, and to make great investigative reporting--you know, that 10,000-word piece you bookmarked that you may never get around to reading--accessible to people who want to make sense of it all.

From the day we started publishing at ProPublica two years ago, we've been committed to highlighting some of the best investigative stories on the Web. The blog is just our way of taking the mission to the next level. It's a process, a conversation we're having here--and one we hope you will join.

And yes, you can add us to your information firehose as well--blog is available via RSS, Twitter and our iPhone app. Feel free to send your thoughts to the ProPublica team, or you can reach me personally by e-mail or Twitter.