How much is tool sprawl costing your newsroom?

How many different tools did you use yesterday to do your job?

We've asked this to newsrooms around the world. The answers are... alarming. Forty tools is common. Some are running 70. One CTO we spoke with counted 80 separate systems. Another of our customers has 120 different tools and workflows that are used across their network.

120.

How did we get here?!?

Nobody planned for this chaos. It happened gradually, then suddenly.

It usually starts innocently enough: your legacy broadcast system can't publish to your website. Fair enough – it was built in 2005 for a very different world. So someone finds a CMS. Problem solved.

Except now you need something for social media. And the reporters in the field need a way to upload video. And the digital team discovers this great tool for scheduling posts. And oh, we need Slack for communication. And someone starts using Trello because the project management features in the old system are terrible. And...

You see where this is heading.

Each tool solves a specific problem. Each one makes perfect sense in isolation. But zoom out and look at the full picture. It can look Jackson Pollock-level messy.

The hidden costs nobody's counting

1. Time. Some broadcasters tell us it takes two hours every morning just to get everyone up to speed on what's happening. Two hours. Every day. That's a full working day lost each week just to... figure out where everything is.

New hires? Training on a 40-tool stack can take weeks. By the time they're fully onboarded, they're exhausted, demotivated, and a fair bit closer to retirement.

2. Information silos. Here's a scenario we hear constantly: A reporter uploads great footage from the field. It goes into one system. The web team, working in a different system, has no idea it exists. So they use something else – lower quality, less relevant. Meanwhile, the TV producer is asking the reporter to re-send the file because they can't access where it was uploaded.

Same organization. Same story. Different tools. Zero visibility.

3. The mental load. Journalists aren't managing one workflow anymore. They're managing platform-specific workflows in platform-specific tools. Writing for web in one place. Social posts in another. TV scripts in a third. Each has its own login, logic, and UX. The cognitive overhead to work across all the platforms? It's exhausting. And it takes focus away from the actual journalism.

4. Cost. This one's obvious but worth stating: 40+ tools means 40+ licenses. Multiple vendor relationships. 40+ potential integration points that could break. 40+ things your IT team has to support.

And when something goes wrong – and it probably will at some point – good luck figuring out which tool is the problem.

When your tools can't talk to each other

The worst part isn't even the number of tools. It's the fact that they don't talk to each other. Even if one vendor offers multiple products, they aren’t guaranteed to be compatible with each other.

Information can live in isolated pockets. The digital team doesn't know what's in the rundown. The TV team can't see what's been published on social. Nobody has a complete picture of what the newsroom is actually producing.

We've heard from news directors who literally cannot answer the question: "What did we publish today?" Not because they don't care, but because there's no single place to look. You'd have to check the CMS, the social scheduler, the broadcast logs, and hope you're not missing something.

“Just one more tool"

Here's the trap: when you're already running 40 tools, adding a 41st doesn't feel like a big deal. The pile is already overwhelming – what's one more?

This is how you end up with:

• Three different chat systems (Slack, Teams, and whatever's built into your old NRCS)
• Multiple project management tools
• Various file sharing solutions
• Different asset libraries that nobody can search across

And that's before we get into the consumer tools that people just... start using. Someone finds a Chrome extension that helps with social media. Another person is using Google Docs because the text editor in the other system is terrible. The list goes on. The knowledge of how to do things becomes tribal, held by individuals rather than the organization.

Your engineering team has lost control. Not because they're bad at their job, but because the pace of change in digital publishing outran the capabilities of traditional broadcast vendors.

What "consolidation" actually means

Every newsroom we talk to says they want to consolidate. Fewer tools. Simpler workflows. One source of truth.

Take Nine Australia, for instance. They faced the daunting reality of navigating 120 disparate systems across their operations – a fragmented landscape built over years of acquisitions. By consolidating into a streamlined workflow, they will reduce that sprawl to just three core systems. It’s a powerful example of how focusing on integration over accumulation doesn't just simplify the IT stack; it fundamentally reclaims time and focus for the newsroom.

But here's the rule we suggest: Any new tool you bring in should replace at least two existing ones. Otherwise, you're not consolidating. You're just adding to the pile.

Story-centric platforms like Saga are built around this idea. Instead of separate tools for planning, rundowns, writing, collaboration, and publishing, you get one system that does all of it.

Does it do everything you need? No. No single tool ever will. But the goal isn't perfection – it's reducing complexity to a manageable level.

What it looks like when you actually simplify

TV 2 Fyn in Denmark had the classic problem: siloed tools, siloed teams, information trapped in different systems. Their Head of Technology and Production, Michael Jensen, described it perfectly: "We were aware that different editorial departments were working in silos, meaning that what they did on the digital desk did not come to the TV desk. We wanted to work story-centric, so whenever news breaks or when covering a planned event, we would be able to work with the content in all our departments, at the same time."

Everyone works in one system. Story planning, content creation, publishing to web and social, linear rundowns – all in the same place.

Fewer logins and context-switching = more actual journalism.

The question isn't whether to consolidate

It's whether you can afford to keep operating like this.

Every tool you add makes your operation more fragile. More complex. More expensive. More exhausting for the people trying to do the actual work.

Story-centric workflows aren't just about better technology. They're about getting back to what matters: telling stories. Not managing tools.

Curious how many tools you could actually replace?