It's not an attempt to belittle it at all, but as far as I know a news site and a blog have the same feature requirements—the main difference that I'm aware of is that a news site has more traffic and more articles and so may need better caching.
If you're aware of requirements that a news site has that a blog doesn't (and I assume you would be, as the OP and creator of the above site), I'd love to hear it.
Blogs and news sites are both in the "content publishing" space, so yes their requirements will overlap. There's likely a complexity continuum from:
1. Something like a one-person blog published by committing Markdown to a GitHub repository and having that published automatically, all the way to;
2. A journalistic news site that has a full CMS back-end tracking multiple authors/bylines, some kind of editor/approval/review workflow, features for deciding what gets shown "above the fold," linters that enforce style guidelines, specialized search features, &c.
While some blogs can have complex requirements and some news sites might be simple, I hope we can appreciate that there will be some blogs that are much, much simpler than the NYT and this have fewer and simpler requirements.
They're both "publishing words," but the back-end complexity reflects the complexity of the business -processes and model more than the complexity of displaying articles on web pages.
Right, I agree with all of this. My point was always that requirements vary and it's pointless to talk about frameworks-vs-no-frameworks unless you're clear up front what your requirements are.
In this particular site's case, the requirements are met by WordPress, so "a WordPress blog" is a simple description of what it is. It wasn't meant to include a value judgement.
If you're aware of requirements that a news site has that a blog doesn't (and I assume you would be, as the OP and creator of the above site), I'd love to hear it.