A content management system is not the opposite of writing static HTML, it's more like a layer of control sitting atop static html files. Pure static “coding” of HTML can be done inside Wordpress. When writing a post in WP I can switch between the rich text editor and the plain text editor as I am typing. I can insert my own inline CSS. I can edit the style sheets, etc etc. I could write the entire post using only the plain text editor.

You could write each news article using a plain text editor and do the HTML manually – then just design a simple management system that takes each file and lists them by date or by length or whatever. A content management system is a back end for manipulating doing stuff with your content.

It almost seems like you mean to say you prefer maintaining and entire news website using no PHP, no putting content / data into databases, no Javascript/AJAX, or anything. Only pure HTML/CSS – My personal opinion being that's utterly insane as your # of articles, etc grows and grows.

So am I not reading you right? I definitely think it'd be helpful for journalist to understand a little bit of the back ends things too, if that's what you mean. But really… software engineering can get very complex especially when you have a website that relies on Javascript/AJAX, PHP/Python/Perl, MySQL or Postgre, HTML, CSS and Apache all at once like some giant cluster fuck. It's probably best to keep a programmer on board. I think it would probably be better for your journalists to be able to spend time learning all about web analytics and analyzing traffic. This is really more comparable to converting analog journalism to digital journalism.

Couple other small points:

>> There is no difference between a great CMS site and a great hand-coded site.

Over generalization and ambiguous.

Also I don't recommend Wordpress for news sites. I think they end up looking awful. I see a lot of hyperlocal news sites try to look legit but they just like this half-blog half-news-site-with-down-syndrome configuration. Have some balls and get drupal, joomla, or contract a programmer. Wordpress is for blogs. If you have to hack it so much just to make it look like something else…

I have been hand coding Html, Xhtml, Javascript and Php for over 4 years now
Its way better to get to know everything that's going on behind scenes.

CMS is just a quick easy way out of things… but takes longer in the long run :*)