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Short abstract:

This presentation draws from semi-structured interviews with media workers to argue that news media organisations frame their usage of cloud computing within scale-making knowledge regimes developed in the 1980s, reasserting institutional continuities while managing infrastructural disruption.

Long abstract:

News media publishers are tech-intensive organisations that have adopted cloud computing as a means to scale-up both their reach and the amount of content they deliver to their audiences. While scope, business models, and providers vary, the virtual totality of the sector has integrated cloud infrastructure. Doing so required significant changes in resource allocation, ranging from hiring specialised workers and developing in-house expertise to the adaptation of workflows to the new digital environment. The implementation of cloud infrastructure in news publishers is a structural organisational change that has durable consequences for the conditions of production of journalism. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with workers of public and private Dutch news media publishers, this presentation explores the knowledge regimes framing the adoption of cloud solutions within these institutions. It argues that cloud technologies are regularly situated within scale-making discourses and practices that emerged in the 1980s in response to the liberalisation of the news market and the emergence of the 24/7 news cycle. These knowledge regimes emphasize the production, acquisition, and broadcasting of news-related content as a strategy to attract subscribers and advertisers. Rather than a transformative infrastructural development, cloud computing is presented as a new tool to reach audiences. In so doing, news media organisations foster institutional continuity while managing infrastructural disruption. However, by deploying decades-old discourses and practices, they also deprive themselves of the capacity to critically challenge scale-making assumptions logged within cloud computing solutions that were not originally designed for news media publishers.