Media organisations often buy cloud newsroom, MAM or supply-chain platforms to reduce brittle integrations, then ask the replacement to reproduce every behaviour of the old facility. TVNewsCheck technology columnist Marcy Lefkovitz argues that this turns sensible individual requests into an expensive bespoke product.
Vendors carry each special feature through testing, documentation, security and future upgrades. Customers face the mirror problem when AI-assisted development makes it easy to build local tools: a prototype quickly becomes infrastructure that needs ownership, budgets, monitoring, access control, incident response and compatibility testing.
The proposed boundary keeps durable functions such as asset identity, permissions, rights, storage, search and audit trails inside a standard supported core. Local differentiation belongs in configuration or documented APIs, webhooks, SDKs and MCP connections with explicit responsibility for operation and retirement.
This is an industry analysis rather than measured research, and no comparative cost dataset is provided. Its value is a decision framework: document the harm avoided by customization, the owner, support cost, upgrade path and exit plan before converting a local preference into permanent technology.
