Journalism in the Cloud
Lisa Williams writes about GlobalPost, whose mission is “to redefine international news for hte digital age.”
GlobalPost intends to build a community of top correspondents as well as a community of users of the site who share the need and the desire for quality news about the world. We invite you to be part of that community and to provide feedback on our coverage and actively engage in the site as a participant. New technology allows us to make newsgathering a more transparent process –a process in which our visitors are invited to take part.
Lisa notes that GlobalPost is seen my some as “a reaction to the shrinking number of foreign correspondents supported by US media outlets facing tough economic times,” and she refers to it as “journalism in the cloud,” a very interesting interpretation.
First she explains cloud computing, using Amazon’s EC2 as an example:
EC2 isn’t storage — it’s compute cycles, the raw power of a server as it does what computer programs do: serve web pages, generate maps, whatever. You’ll use EC2 as an insurance policy — instead of buying powerful servers just in case you get a ton of traffic or new users one day, EC2 lets you buy compute cycles like you buy electricity: a lot when you need it, a little when you don’t. Services like these are generally called “cloud computing” because when you draw a diagram of your nifty new system, you’ll represent these third party services as a cloud — opaque, because you don’t care what’s in them, just that you get reliable utility from servers and storage that’s “in the cloud.”
She then refers to sites like GlobalPost and Spot.us as “the first inklings of ‘journalism in the cloud.’”
Just as many tech outfits have figured out that it’s too expensive to have too many fixed assets, many news outlets are faced with the fact that they can’t support the same number of foreign correspondents or beat reporters. The fundamental experiment that these sites are running, each with their own protocol, is this: How can we make journalism happen where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and then redeploy elsewhere when things change?
We’ve been talking for years about journalistic collaboration with bloggers and crowdsourcing, too, and we’re all so much better informed (and at times, so much more spectacularly misnformed or disinformed) because there are so many sources, both professional and amateur. A cloud journalism is a little different, I think – a professional organization accessing info from sources that are mostly professional and applying journalistic standards to apply a quality news product. What we’re referring to as the cloud is not just everybody who’s talking about a particular news item close to the scene, but a more limited set of professionals who understand how to zero in on the elusive facts of the matter.
I’m still pondering this – I mainly just like the term “cloud journalism” (which I first saw in a tweet exchange, Amy Gahran with my Extreme Democracy co-editor Mitch Ratcliffe (@godsdog).
