Across Europe, news media companies increasingly depend on cloud services run by a handful of powerful tech actors. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide the digital infrastructure that underpins the functioning of newsrooms – from data storage and content production tools to team management, audience analytics, and the growing use of artificial intelligence. Yet this dependence remains largely invisible in debates about media freedom and regulation.
In ‘Clouded Judgements’, ARTICLE 19’s Head of Digital Dr Corinne Cath-Speth and Agustin Ferrari Braun from the University of Amsterdam discuss how cloud infrastructure has become a critical but overlooked source of power. While policymakers have focused on platforms’ influence over content distribution and moderation, the article shows that the cloud operates at a deeper level, shaping the technical conditions under which journalism is produced and managed.
The authors argue that the widespread outsourcing of digital infrastructure fundamentally undermines media independence. By giving control over essential systems to oligopolistic cloud providers, news organisations enter structurally unequal relationships that limit their autonomy, expose them to technical and geopolitical vulnerability, and compromise the confidentiality of journalistic work. Moreover, these dependencies lock media organisations into infrastructures they cannot meaningfully control or exit.
This power imbalance severely limits media organisations’ ability to contest pricing, contract terms, or strategic changes imposed by providers, including the integration of new features such as AI tools that reshape newsroom practices without editorial consent. Over time, cloud adoption also prompts redistribution of power within media organisations, shifting key decisions away from journalists and editors.
Drawing on 26 interviews with media workers and managers in France and the Netherlands, ‘Clouded Judgements’ examines how cloud migration affects both large media groups and independent outlets. While their strategies and resources differ, they face a common challenge: reliance on a single cloud infrastructure exposes news organisations to new forms of technical failure, external interference, and loss of institutional autonomy.
As debates around media freedom mainly focus on platforms and content moderation, ARTICLE 19 calls attention to the infrastructural foundations that quietly shape journalism. We argue that safeguarding press freedom in the digital age requires confronting not only who controls the circulation of news, but also who controls the systems that enable today’s media to produce, store, and disseminate their journalistic work.