It's worth noting that our main news site, npr.org, is not all served from flat files. This is specific to our news applications team (apps.npr.org) and our client-side projects.
Which does make sense, since it's a constantly updated site-- regenerating all of the files (to update "what's new" lists and such) each time an article is written would be major overkill.
While I'm sure you guys already do this, proper caching can have a similar effect to a completely static site in terms of performance.
While I'm sure you guys already do this, proper caching can have a similar effect to a completely static site in terms of performance.