Best Practice: Using WordPress to publish monthly magazine

So…

I’m putting together a site using WordPress.
It will have various about pages, a standard blog but in addition, a monthly magazine consisting of a front page and about 5 sub pages – the same format/pages every time.

I want to use the same dashboard if possible.

My questions are:

1) What is the best way to go about this?
I’m thinking about dividing categories – Blog | Magazine and then building categories within these (Blog: Food, Drink, Animals. Magazine: Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3) and then making the posts within an issue order by an additional field rather than date. Is there a better way?

2) If I go with aforementioned method; is there a way of duplicating this set of posts with a new category – the next issue number?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Matt