Need Help

That's a big bag of beans you're opening there. I started using Drupal a few months back with the intent of building a newspaper site and it is NOT something you can complete within a few days if you're new to Drupal. Somebody recently posted something similar to what you're asking here:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/21459

What I would suggest is to forget about building a newspaper site right out of the gate. What you should learn is the fundamentals of how Drupal works. The best way I found is to pick up a book. Yes, there are a ton of tutorials online, but I've found them to be scattered, not organized in the best way, and a lot of authors of the tutorials make a lot of assumptions and skip important steps. So picking up a book may be very 20th century, but I think many here agree it's a good way to start if you're new to Drupal.

I bought this book a few months back and it's an excellent introduction to using Drupal, hence perhaps, why it's named "Using Drupal" (http://www.amazon.com/Using-Drupal-Angela-Byron/dp/0596515804). A lot of the authors come from www.lullabot.com. There's also a discussion on it here: http://drupal.org/node/333901

My suggestion? Learn the basics of Drupal first, then you can start building some projects and eventually get going on your newspaper site. The Drupal community is VERY helpful with answering questions, and most likely, somebody has already asked the same question, and has had it answered. Make sure you hunt around first for your answer, as common questions are less likely to get a response other than a link to a thread with the same question.

Good luck man!

CCK, to create a story type that is rich enough;
Nodequeue, to manage lists;
Views, to create database queries in order to generate the various blocks on your page;
Quicktabs, to create tabbed output as in your example;
Panels, to lay out the page.

To hit your target, you're going to have to learn a lot about how to theme Views output. It's not rocket science, but it is work.