Right, to deliver their product over a tech channel to their many millions of customers. No, that's not easy. Yes, that's necessarily complex.
You and your buddies can build a crossword or whatever the hell in a weekend. You can't deliver is to 100 million people tomorrow, while also maintaining one of the US' largest newpapers online.
For a crossword, which shards pretty trivially, while already having a database team to deal with that side of things? Large orgs move slowly so there are many reasons why you couldn't write something over the weekend and deploy it that quickly, but the challenges at that level are bureaucratic, not technical.
You and your buddies can build a crossword or whatever the hell in a weekend. You can't deliver is to 100 million people tomorrow, while also maintaining one of the US' largest newpapers online.