Its been real easy to build small and large web apps for news organization on Google Sheets. Most recently we built an "AI Election Tracker" for 2024 elections across the globe
We skip Google's API which I really dislike. The sheets are set to publish to the web and you can use that to pull down the data and parse it into JSON files.
It take less than a minute to set the basics up now.
https://restofworld.org/2024/elections-ai-tracker/
GS is not the best editorial interface but its not bad either, especially when it allows you to get things done quickly.
Likewise, this was another fun project (since retired) that sits on Google Sheets:
https://restofworld.org/stat-of-the-day/
We skip Google's API which I really dislike. The sheets are set to publish to the web and you can use that to pull down the data and parse it into JSON files.
It take less than a minute to set the basics up now.