Nearly a hundred press publishers were invited to rate the tools that make up their tech stack, or "digital toolkit". The study, conducted by Sciences Po and The Audiencers, provides an overview of the applications and software used by editorial teams in their operations.
Moderate satisfaction
Press publishers are not fully convinced by the tools they use to manage their activities, giving an average rating of 6.4/10 to their tech stack overall. But this level of satisfaction varies significantly depending on their business segments. Some results show average or even low satisfaction with tools that are nonetheless essential to their development.
Subscription management tools, such as Mahalo or Edis, show the lowest satisfaction level with a score of 5.8/10 despite a wide range of available services (the survey lists over 17). "Contribution managers," dedicated to managing and moderating comments submitted by readers, barely fare better with a score of 6/10. Furthermore, most editors surveyed use proprietary tools (19%), that is, a tool developed internally or used exclusively by a media outlet, despite a low satisfaction level (5.4/10).
Google's Popularity
The American firm appears in numerous areas studied by the survey: Analytics, Editorial Planning, Map Production, Data Hosting, etc. In total, 9 of its services appear in the survey, and sometimes in the top position regarding adoption rate. Generally, these tools receive good satisfaction ratings. Google Ad Manager is for example by far the leading tool used for advertising management and monitoring with an adoption rate of 57%. For data visualization, Google still dominates with Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) (adoption rate: 37%). It also has a significant lead in the field of video hosting and distribution with YouTube, which has an adoption rate of 42.5% among newsrooms surveyed for the survey, compared to 22.5% for Dailymotion.
Google's work ecosystem and its services such as Google Docs, Sheets, and Calendar are also favored in newsroom organization (33.3% adoption rate).
Media companies embracing AI
For this 2023 edition, the study naturally looked at the use of artificial intelligence. While some respondents claim they never use it or only for certain specific internal tasks, others have already fully integrated AI into their tech stack. For example, newsrooms use DeepL to facilitate the translation of their content, ChatGPT for proofreading articles and correcting errors, and Trint (which has an adoption rate of 11.7%) for transcribing their audio content.
However, almost no media outlet surveyed had equipped itself with
Media outlets favor in-house CMSs and neglect open source
Press editors surveyed in this study gave their CMS (Content Management System) an average rating of 6.9/10. The CMS is one of the rare areas where in-house solutions are preferred. Their adoption rate is 25%, compared to 20% for WordPress and 8.3% for Drupal. The latter is experiencing a significant decline in usage. Last year, its adoption rate was 26.3%, a sign that media outlets are moving away from open source solutions according to the study, which notes that several media organizations still using this type of solution are in the process of phasing out and that they are ready to invest in developing their own tools to gain agility. According to the survey results, in-house solutions also lead the tools used for live text coverage, contribution managers, and firewalls.
