As journalists maybe we should be a bit worried about major software giant’s who champion the development of cloud computing. Journalists really only have one stock to trade on and that is trust, although they should also have some shares in honesty. Without these it’s unrealistic to expect people to be interested in what we’re writing, broadcasting or blogging.
Now if all your work was published on Google’s mainframes does that not mean that Google is your editor? Only thing is I’m not too sure about having Google as my editor. Its principles aren’t really the same. You may well remember that Google, along with Microsoft and Yahoo, has been complicit with the Chinese government in blocking pages which criticise the regime. There are powerful economic reasons for doing this but it is not a course of action that is compatible with good journalism.
Would I trust them to publish my content if it was on a hot topic of the day? I have little reason to believe that the UK government would pressure Google to remove my controversial stories from its mainframes in the same way, but we are talking about instituting a system for many years to come, not just the here and now. Make no mistake, cloud computing is expensive and it would take some time to disperse it if it were to become the norm.
Google works at the whim of the market and what is good for business is not always good for free speech. Robert Petson has been accused of playing a part in the financial crisis arguing that his reporting of it further undermined markets which led to companies failing. Is it possible that had Google been publishing his material they might have been inclined to remover or sabotage it for fear of affecting their stock price as markets slumped. Obviously we don’t know, but we do know that they are inclined to chose economic advantage over an ethical one, as their part in China’s great firewall shows us.
If google were to do this to sure up their own stock, it would affect journalists stock of trust in the oposite direction. The question is: Do journalists really want to be put in such a vulnerable position, for the sake of a bit of convenient file sharing? Let us write for to improve our own market price not someone elses.
Image by mellowbox
