Newspack by WordPress.com – A New Publishing Solution for News Organizations

This is great. Local news, in my opinion, needs to be able to innovate online, but they can't. They seem to all be using some monolithic old publishing system because without a better system available, they're afraid of the complexity and can't get tech expertise to help them.

They need to add CDN, caching etc. in the core WP and anyone can have a viable self-published, self-hosted site. Why depend on minefield plugins and/or paid hosting?