I must admit, I am making an important assumption: that the extension will allow using the actual "blog posts" themselves as an includable piece of a larger wiki page, so that the newspaper can, in fact, have both a newspaper-y layout and a simple backend for posting new entries.
Can anyone tell us whether or not the Wikilog extension will permit this?
You can use transclusions to include the text of one page on another. (Templates are actually just a fancy, pre-defined method doing transclusion.) This is how I made the Dwilight Daily. You can create one page and then transclude it into as many different pages as you want. You don't have to do anything fancy to make a page transcludable. Any page can be transcluded into any other page. So whatever extension you created to enter the articles wouldn't have to do anything special.
There is a way, using semantic forms, to create a form users can use to edit a page that prompts them for all the required information to embed the semantic data. You can then use semantic queries to display the desired articles on a page using transclusion.
You shouldn't need to redesign anything, or code any kind of special CMS application. It just takes someone who has the time to figure out how to use the tool we already have to do it. I tried to do it with the TattleMaster, just never had the time to really polish it up and make it work easily enough.
