Over the past year, I’ve had dozens of conversations with news publishers about their tech stacks — what’s working, what’s painful, and what they’re prioritising next.

Recently, INMA ran a tech stack survey across a range of mid-sized news organisations — not the global giants who are often innovative but outliers to the industry but the majority of the market who have to make pragmatic decisions because budgets and time are not endless. 

The responses were varied, of course, but taken together they tell a very consistent story about where news media is in its technology evolution and where it’s headed. Their answers paint a picture of an industry in motion but not in upheaval.

The top-line message?

This is not a period of transformation. It’s a period of incremental optimisation.

The most striking finding is how many organisations still rely on in-house systems at the core of their publishing operations.

The CMS* — this thing we all love to hate — remains something publishers either built themselves or continue to hold together with layers of integrations and workarounds. Not because they are particularly attached to the software but because the alternatives feel risky.

Replatforming is expensive. Migration is painful. And, most importantly, no vendor has yet cracked the full complexity of newsroom workflow, identity management, rights management, and multichannel publishing in a way that feels worth the switch. 

The same is true of subscription and paywall systems.

Yes, names like Piano and Zephr appear in the responses. But there are many that are a combination of these off-the-shelf tools and those built internally. Many publishers are essentially knitting together a revenue stack from CRM tools, payment processors, audience databases, and homegrown logic.

And here again, it’s not because the market lacks options. It’s because the cost of pulling these systems apart feels greater than the cost of patching them for another year.

If you step back, this tells us something important: We are not in a cycle of replacement. We are in a cycle of layering.

And layering is where AI enters the picture.

When asked how AI is changing their tech stack, news publishers did not describe reinvention. They described assistance. AI is being used to transcribe interviews, summarise meeting notes, tidy copy, translate headlines, tag images, surface archive content, and provide analytics insights that once required an overworked audience editor and three spreadsheet tabs. 

None of this fundamentally alters what journalism is. But it does subtly shift where work happens.

A journalist may still publish through the CMS. But the thinking, drafting, refining, and preparing is increasingly happening elsewhere — in standalone AI tools, in browser-based writing assistants, in transcription platforms that suggest story angles, in mobile apps that convert voice notes to structured outlines.

The CMS has become the place where content lands, not the place where content begins.

This is a quiet but meaningful shift. Workflows are detaching from core platforms. The newsroom is slowly unbundling itself from the CMS — not through a dramatic platform shift but through a gradual migration of cognitive work to lighter, more flexible environments.

So if we zoom out, what does this moment in time look like?

We’re right in the middle of a revolution. A phase defined less by big rebuilds and more by careful adjustments — sometimes subtle, sometimes frustrating, always incremental. News organisations are searching for time, not transformation. They are optimising, not reinventing. They are absorbing new capability, not handing over control.

Tech isn’t changing everything, and news organisations aren’t ripping out systems and starting again. We’re seeing layering, mix and match, and slow shifts. 

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