create simple database entries - new content types?

thanks in advance. suppose i want to maintain a list of newspaper headlines, with their publication dates and whether they have pictures or not. what i had before was a book page where users would add <li>'s over and over, but what i really want is for each article to be an entry in a database.
i made a new content type via flexinode, but that's cumbersome, no? for example, the date that a user adds *has* to have a time, which is irrelevant for this purpose.
does it make more sense to write a module that allows a user to type in a title, fill in a date, and check a box? not that i know how to do this...