The Journalism Cloud Alliance aims to ensure watchdog journalism can perform its public service role by controlling the rising costs and constraints of cloud computing and developing collaborative solutions to collective challenges.
The Global Fund for Media Development (GFMD) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) spearhead the Alliance. Besides BIRN, the partners include Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Pulitzer Center, Center for Journalism and Liberty, Big Local News, Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), Forbidden Stories, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), alongside philanthropic and academic organizations.
“The Journalism Cloud Alliance is crucial to building the blueprint for the future of investigative reporting. As journalists, we’re flooded with data we can’t process, analyze, and report on and it’s the public that loses because of this situation. We need to create a data infrastructure that allows us to create more trust with readers and help lead to more robust democracies,” said OCCRP Co-Founder Paul Radu.
Cloud services are infrastructural to journalism today and are likely to become even more important as the amount of data generated increases, as well as AI integration into the newsrooms.
The Journalism Cloud Alliance aims to democratize access to data storage and processing capacity by promoting collaboration among various stakeholders, and to make data resources more accessible and affordable for investigative and data-driven newsrooms worldwide.
Support will be provided to large and small newsrooms. The Alliance also prioritizes fostering accountability journalism and investigative efforts across the scale.
The next steps include conducting detailed cloud capacity and cost research on current and potential members of the Alliance and adding more members to build a robust coalition to secure long-term financial and technical support for these journalism costs.