Using Drupal to bring newspapers online

I'm Co-Editor-in-Chief of my high school's newspaper. Over the summer, I setup a website for the newspaper, using Drupal for content management.

I love Drupal, but we have run into some issues translating our print media publication to the internet.

My first challenge was getting all of my staff members as users with the right privileges. I had to wait for them to sign up and then make their user the right role. After that, I had to rely on them to post their own stories. Some people couldn't figure out how to post, and others just didn't. Additionally, sometimes we have two people work on one story, and I couldn't figure out a way to deal with that.

I was also never really able to rectify the issue-based nature of our publication with Drupal. I would like for the current issue to kind of take control of the site, and then have a way to access past issues. Kind of like this site.

For a variety of reasons, our site is now in a state of neglect and disrepair. It had become forgotten and abandoned. I want to bring it back to life and to do it right this time.

I do know php, html, and such, but I never really had a lot of time to spend making my own modules or hacks. I looked over a lot of stuff this summer, but in the end it came down to just getting something up. That is also why the site uses a modified version of the interlaced theme instead of its own unique one. Development of Drupal has also grown quite rapidly since september, and I haven't been able to keep up on all that is going on.

I actually have some time to devote to the site now, and I'd deeply appreciate any thoughts or suggestions on how to resurrect it.

I really like Drupal and would like to use it, but if there is a better choice for my particular needs, I'd appreciate any referrals as well.

Thanks in advance.

-Dan