No, a group full of software engineers definitely couldn't start a news room on their own in a day, week, or month. But there's definitely still a huge hole in

No, a group full of software engineers definitely couldn't start a news room on their own in a day, week, or month. But there's definitely still a huge hole in the news room for folks who "know how to code [together]", or at the very least folks who know how to build the support infrastructure. At many of the biggest news rooms, it's often a single person building infrastructure, ETL pipelines, performance tuning, visualization, etc etc. Taking away a lot of the drudgery of dealing with ETL pipelines could go a very long way for the news room. The competition for these jobs is so high that newsrooms end up with data folk who can wield magic, but with very little pay, support, and equipment (one data reporter I talked to had a windows machine with 4gb of ram!) to fulfill their jobs. My point being that there's a middle ground where we simply have more software folk inside, or close to, the news room. Consider that as more information is created/stored (regardless of government, corporations, or private), the requirement for collecting/parsing/cleaning through that information for the news room will become harder and harder. I'm sure some phase transition will happen, but probably not for a while.