Compare & Contrast: The major differences between building a site by hand with HTML/CSS and using WordPress is that you have complete control over the structure with HTML/CSS. Most of the customizability in WordPress is backed by themes and basic movement setting. In HTML/CSS, you can not only choose the exact location you want words/images to be, but you can choose the shapes and colors you want different elements to be, among other advanced customization codes.
Control vs. Convenience: For multimedia content creators, I personally think that convenience is better. Especially when there is a platform that provides sufficient enough customization to produce a good product. For content creators, I think their main focus should be their own content. By building your websites with HTML/CSS, you could take away from the quality of your content in an effort to make both look good.
Future Skills: I think that technical coding knowledge and CMS knowledge can both be beneficial in specific fields of journalism. One program might be more useful than another depending on what type of journalistic work someone does, but I also think that in the right circumstance they can build off one another. In standard journalism, I think CMS proficiency is probably more useful, as it gives you the ability to produce stories and writing pieces more efficiently than through code.
A Hybrid Approach?: I think a scenario where combining both would be ideal would be in the form of a personal website where a journalist would write stories that directly correlate with the website that they create. This would probably be done by a journalist with a more creative mindset that doesn’t see their content fitting any webpage but their own.
Though both options are certainly viable for journalists depending on the content and stories they would like to produce, I think that combining both could be a way for journalists to express themselves creatively while also showcasing the skills that they have developed in the field.