First of all, is this for college, middle school, high school, etc.?
In any case, when I was working back at a small-town newspaper, I did some market research and found out that many newspaper sites use open-source CMS's like Xoops and then customize them to look like a paper. One example I vividly remember is The Lowell Online (http://www.thelowell.org/) - they're a high school newspaper using a open-source CMS (Mambo) and it looks very professional and almost custom-coded. You may want to check them out as an example/reference.
