Newsletter Publisher Looking for Guidance

We publish a variety of newsletters that started in the mid-1990s. Currently, multiple authors e-mail content to an editor who creates each newsletter title using desktop word processing application software. We use majordomo to distribute newsletters to subscribers by e-mail. A variety of perl scripts created over the past decade chop the published newsletters into one-story-per-database-record and then export the content in to a variety of destinations in a variety of formats.

We’re looking to change how we construct and distribute newsletters and how we reuse our content. I think I’m looking for a content management system. I’m uncertain if WordPress leads me in the right or wrong direction. I’m looking for guidance.

In general terms, we want a system that will:

— accept content (text, graphics, audio files, pdf files, etc.) from multiple contributors, stringers, authors and information sources;

— present that content to one or more editors for review and approval (or return the content to the author with comments or questions); and

— export the content to a variety of destinations in a variety of formats.

Is this what WordPress does?

With much greater specificity, can WordPress, for example:

— export all stories approved for publication in Newsletter A within the past 24 hours to a single e-mail message with all headlines in alphabetical order;

— send each story as it is approved for publication to one or more RSS feeds;

— export subsets of the news approved for distribution within the past week to a pdf file and post that file on a Web site; and

— send batches of recently approved stories to an ftp site?

Can these four specific processes occur automatically without human intervention? If this type of functionality isn’t innate to WordPress, how much trauma and money would be required to make it happen? Who could I contact who could make it happen?

I’m interested in learning about other choices if anyone detects that I’m going down the wrong road exploring WordPress as a more efficient way to publish and distribute the newsletters we publish, or if the cost to make WordPress work the way we want will be breathtaking at the end of the day.

Fundamentally, we’re looking for a system that will receive content from any source, hold it, and export it to any destination in any format, without a lot of people performing tedious manual tasks. We want our authors, contributors, stringers, editors and managers to spend time focusing on the words and ideas we’re delivering to our subscribers, rather than formatting, reformatting, coding, fonts, margins, layout, _ML tagging, and other minutiae.