Drupal as newspaper site: a challenge

I love drupal. It rocks. I really like what some people have been able to do with the sites that don't have the "drupal look". When clients want a site, they want what they find else. And that's the situation I'm in. I've got a request for a news portal. I've look at a lot of the news sites, and they all look great. Wouldn't it be cool if we could pool all of that knowledge - from having images instead of "Email this page", insert ad's into the node someway down, having images with captions, first taxonomy term specific blocks etc - in a single place.

That's my challenge. Take a simple news site in New Zealand like www.nzherald.co.nz for example. It's based on taxonomy's. It's not drupal, but it is quite similar. Can we replicate it?

I can't paste a table layout I made to reference to it, but please visit the page and I'll explain the sections of the page (and add some little extras in)

Node

1. The page is taxonomy based
2. First taxonomy term with RSS feed
3. Images with print page, email page, comment on page
4. Attached image with caption and photographer (not in website)
5. Inline advertisement half way down page taxonomy term related
6. Not in this website, but a google style related news stories (i.e. other articles about the exactly same topic/news item, i.e. from different news sources on the same topic)
6. Taxonomy terms at bottom (not including main/first taxonomy term)
7. Social networking sites at bottom

Blocks

8. First taxonomy term specific news block (latest 15)
9. RSS feed subscription
10. taxonomy term email alert
11. Related news (not in page, but think along the lines of it searches for stories with similar taxonomy)
12. A map with regions/areas with a search box for regions

So how would we do this?

General node layout

a. cck template?

Taxonomy page "Templates"

Clearly 2, 8, 9 and 10 are based on a specific term or the first term.
How would you:
b. have a generic node template that included this (and all the other layout stuff)
c. have a block that will pop up on every page, or every news page (for a website that does more than news) and read the first taxonomy, and print that information, an rss feed for it etc. I'm assuming you create a block in views in some manner with arguements? How is this done?

Is there already a views export for this?

Images with text

d. How do you replace the words "Print this page" or "Email this Page" etc with an image, or put an image at the front of that text?

Image with caption

e. Is the best way to create a new content type and include an image field and a caption field? How do you then make it popup in the node?

Use CCK, upload an image, node image, image module?

Related news stories

As far as I can tell there are generally three types of related news stories:
i. user defined related news stories: on the same story (i.e. like how google news has lists of different media stories on exactly the same event)
ii. user defined related news stories: generally related, i.e. might be on an ongoing story (i.e. theres a strike at a car company, there was one 1 year ago etc)
iii. taxonomy generated related news stories. i.e. calculated related story based on different taxonomy terms

f. Whats the best module for this? There seem to be several related news stories blocks. There is also the CCK nodeselect for user defined.

News region map

g. How do you have an image of a map with areas/counties selectable but as regions.

Do we use Gmap or just an image with select areas?

I'm sure someone can make a better summary of all this and there are many better ideas for news stories. I just thought I could get a centralised place for this ball rolling. It would be good for a how-to section with all these different areas.

Yours,
Simon