“Reliable and Cheap”?: Examining the adoption of the cloud by European news media companies

Since the middle of the 2010s, an overwhelming majority of European news media companies have adopted cloud infrastructures. While a growing number of scholars and policymakers are raising concerns regarding the implications of cloud dependence, a systemic exploration of why media companies decided to undergo such infrastructural transformation is still missing. Building on 41 semi-structured interviews with news media professionals in France and the Netherlands, the present contribution shows that the move to the cloud was justified by the supposed reliability and cheapness of these infrastructures. Unpacking what is meant by those categories, the present paper shows how the infrastructure, labour practices, and workforce of news media companies has adapted itself to the cloud, normalising new forms of infrastructural dependence. The paper then goes on to show that conceptualising these changes through the categories of reliability and cheapness inscribes them within the traditional socio-technical imaginaries of media infrastructure, foregrounding their invisibility. However, doing so also obscures the unequal power relations between cloud providers and news media companies.