I am not aware of any daily publication website, myself.
I'm not sure what the real concerns are here, since content is aggregated and distributed under so many methods. If you are simply talking about scanning the paper and serving that way, I could see issues with that. You'd have to find the right scanning/OCR software, then determine a format to distribute it with, etc. Since you are talking GoogleDocs here, that doesn't sound like a concern.
Not accounting for specific styling, a news media site is not any different than a blog, except its frequency and the source of content. All can be accounted for using MODX. By using the tutorial to create a blog, you could easily abstract how to convert it to newspaper media. The primary mitigating factor with MODX would be the number of pages (depending on the number of articles per day you are creating). Even then, the number is large enough to account for years of distribution and can be offset in any number of ways.
The article you reference says it all
“A lot of what took us so long to roll this out has been because of the complexity of the site, not the complexity of the setup."
. This is the absolute truth.
Before asking questions like this, it is best to have a strategy in mind. Know how you want to do something and we can all throw out some answers for you. Otherwise, we're just simply brainstrorming. Questions you should be able to answer:
What is your client's production process now?
What do they want their production flow to be?
What about their current process is unsatisfactory? (cost? number of steps? knowledge requirement? training time?)
What are their goals in changing the process?
Once you have these answers, it will be much easier to assist. Otherwise, all I can do is throw out ideas. That said, MODX is super-fast to develop any-type of site in (in my experience).
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