1. Well, yeah. If you want to "gather" news, not merely repurpose handouts, comics and AP copy, then you need humans to do the gathering, though I don't doubt someone somewhere is trying to infuse essence of Woodstein into a Terminator. The problem for the sawdust-for-horses approach is that readers can now get their AP copy, handouts and comics everywhere. 2. If it seems as if the newsroom eats up a disproportionate share of the budget, that's because the annihilation of the composing, press and mail rooms happened decades ago.
The newsonomics of Pulitzers, paywalls, and investing in the newsroom[
Nieman Journalism Lab]