I can give some insight on this.
I launched my own MMA site back in 2006 (UltiMMAte.com). Having done web dev before, I ran the site on Joomla and made customizations myself (which saved costs), and it was a pretty decent interface. However, the perpetual challenge which every site faces is traffic, and how to generate it.
I had ideas about being a database of sorts for things that weren't covered on other sites, but it was impossible to compete with Sherdog's fight finder in that regard. Sherdog has the ultimate database to generate MMA-related traffic.
I found my niche in doing play-by-play on a live chat format (hosted on my site), but had no idea that chat software was so resource-intensive, so in the midst of one of my sessions, my (shared) hosting company shut the site down—which killed that concept.
But to your point, starting a news website. This would be an insanely difficult task in 2016 I would imagine. Writing for one currently, the same issue exists: traffic. There's not merely enough of it to compensate for your (or anyone else involved's) time and effort that's going to go into maintaining it.
The only way to generate large amounts of traffic in this realm is to report actual news which have somehow eluded other major sites. Being the first to report ends up getting your outlet linkbacks on other MMA news sites (if they're reputable and credit you for breaking the story), message boards, social media, etc. But since MMA is an industry with one major player, and the UFC has the media on payroll so they can control how they want their news to be reported, this would be a fool's errand, IMO, unless you've got some sort of "in" with the UFC and can get in their good graces immediately. The "Arielgate" edition of the MMA Hour was an excellent education on how things work within the MMA media, and how getting ostracized by the UFC for reporting news to generate traffic on your site is a very real possibility.
The only other options are covering secondary promotions like Bellator, WSOF, RIZIN, One, etc, but then you're severely cutting off your potential for traffic. I would guess UFC is responsible for ~98% of MMA's digital media traffic. Another option is doing opinion/analysis pieces (which is what I do), but from personal experience, nobody really cares, and trying to advertise it on message boards usually results in negative feedback since hardcore MMA fans value their own opinion over anyone else's. Not much success to be found there.
Other issues you might face are being "blacklisted" on certain social media outlets like Reddit, who have a relationship with Fightland and are very quick to "filter" out other MMA news sites. Twitter is better since there are no moderators using personal bias to selectively choose what gets featured, but even still, it's extremely difficult to get anything featured on Twitter unless you've spent time getting half a million followers or are using their paid service to feature your tweets.
In conclusion, obviously if you have a passion for it, then this is something that can much easily (and inexpensively) be done now in the digital age than twenty years ago when you'd actually have to invest money into starting your own newsletter or something. But it should be treated as a hobby, unless you have the aforementioned resources to report exclusive UFC-related news. Only then would it make sense to establish your own MMA news outlet.
