Independent Media Has an Infrastructural Problem

Over the course of the last months, many legacy media corporations have established partnerships with AI providers. Even The New York Times, which is currently fighting a very public lawsuit against OpenAI, has decided to adopt AI solutions. These organizations have been steadily investing in their digital infrastructure for the better part of the past decade, to the point where they can (or think they can) safely collaborate with AI partners to improve their products. But what happens to the thousands of independent outlets that have not been able to make similar investments?

Independent media are not the partners of Big Tech; they are their clients. They rely on off-the-shelf solutions for their entire infrastructure, from cloud computing provision to data analytics. This relationship of infrastructural dependency raises questions over their capacity to stay autonomous in a digital space increasingly characterized by state intervention, monopolization, and commercial demands that don’t always fit the public values upheld by independent media.

From rabid independence to infrastructural capture

Infrastructural dependence on Big Tech was not always the norm for independent media. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, projects like Indymedia understood that preserving their independence in the digital arena required them to develop their own solutions to produce and broadcast content. However, the eruption of social media changed the game. Facebook, Twitter, and even Google allowed independent outlets to reach a considerably larger public while massively reducing their infrastructural costs.

Eventually, they would come to realize that relying on these platforms made them vulnerable to the capricious whims of the algorithm. The downfall of former social media-powered giants like Buzzfeed or Vice acted as cautionary tales of what happens when you don’t have any control over the drivers of your audience. The French Union of Independent Online Press (SPIIL) now demands that new members have their own independent websites, for they consider that relying solely on social media is too risky.

Yet, by the time this became common wisdom in the late 2010s, the damage had already been done. Independent infrastructure providers had either gone out of business or become too costly for smaller media outlets, and there was a fully mature market of ready-made solutions for whatever these outlets might need. Infrastructure expenditures are often sunken investments with little, if any, potential to generate revenue. Already pressed for money and without the resources to develop their own solutions, independent media adopted these services en masse.

Take, for instance, WordPress. This solution offers an open-source publishing platform that is resilient to cyberattacks and can handle traffic peaks when, for instance, breaking news is published. At the same time, according to an independent outlet that I interviewed for my research, adopting WordPress also required them to adopt AWS as their cloud provider to meet the requirements of the service. Herein lies the issue.

Challenges to media independence

“Lo barato sale caro” is a Spanish expression that roughly translates to “cheap is expensive.” Nowhere is this truer than in the field of infrastructure. Amazon might be able to provide cheaper and more user-friendly hosting solutions, but once you’ve moved your entire organization to its services, you’ve become completely dependent on them. Although they are not yet shutting down critical outlets, Big Tech companies can exert a significant amount of power over independent media.

The most obvious problem is security. What happens if the servers of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft shut down all of a sudden? I asked this question to CTOs of different European media outlets, and they all provided a variation of the same answer: if that happens, it’s going to be such a big mess that nobody will notice that we’re down as well. That is obviously true, but it raises a more prescient question: why are we delegating so much power in the hands of a handful of companies accountable only to their shareholders? If we were to witness such a catastrophic event, millions of people would like to read an explainer.

The second issue that infrastructural dependency poses is a matter of privacy. As Jennifer Holt detailed in her excellent Cloud Policy, cloud environments have been designed to give providers and the state access to the data stored in them. The rise of far-right authoritarianism, spurred by Big Tech billionaires, should raise concerns about the capacity of hostile actors to access private information from journalists and their sources. Even if this power is not exerted, the possibility of it happening in the future is enough to foster self-censorship among critical voices who can never be quite sure about the confidentiality of their communications.

This softer form of power brings us to the third issue: the implicit logics and values embedded within these productive environments. The purpose of a system is what it does; if your work environment is designed to maximize scale and sales revenues, you will be constantly nudged towards adopting these frames of reference as your guiding principles. We can see this logic manifesting in the exponential growth of multimedia content over the course of the last few years. Does our public sphere need thousands upon thousands of badly produced podcasts, rushed opinion pieces, and barely edited videos? Probably not, but our tools are optimized to favor such approaches rather than more qualitative outlooks.

Towards an industrial strategy for (independent) media

Bigger media conglomerates are keenly aware of these problems, or at least of the first two. Over the last years, they have started to favor a multi-cloud approach to offset the dangers of depending too heavily on one provider. Many have also returned to local infrastructure to host their journalistic data and avoid compromising leaks. Ironically, the very essence of independent media – its lack of reliance on state or corporate funding – makes it impossible for them to replicate such a strategy.

Perhaps more importantly, I don’t think they should. An ideal future for journalism is not one where outlets spend more and more of their resources on developers and infrastructure. Most independent companies are fine with having one or two devs on their payroll, and their requirements are not unique enough to justify building new solutions from the ground up. Rather, a sustainable future for independent media is one where outlets have easy access to infrastructural solutions designed to protect and enhance core values like journalistic independence, press freedom, and a media ecosystem that takes seriously its mission to inform and cultivate society.

Initiatives such as the EuroStack are starting to chart the way for new infrastructural solutions. As it becomes transparent that Silicon Valley is working for the Trump administration (or perhaps the other way around), we expect to see more of these initiatives flourish. However, developing new services that replicate the logics of their predecessors will not solve independent media’s infrastructural problem. We need to think, devise, and roll out infrastructures that foster public values and common good over the market imperatives of an attention economy driven by nothing more than growth and scale. Without new forms of industrial thinking, we might change dependencies without actually creating a healthier public sphere.