Web Platform & Design Advice for Nonprofit Newsroom and Newsletter

Platform Justice (platformjustice.org) is a 501(c)(3) data activism nonprofit building public infrastructure to document and expose gig platform harm — shadowbans, deactivations, wage suppression, and algorithmic discrimination affecting gig workers.
We are launching a public-facing newsroom and newsletter called The Record. We need a 60-minute consultation to help us make the right decisions on both technology and design before we build anything. We're looking for a volunteer with web design experience to help talk us through the following:

Technology questions:
-Whether to build our newsroom and newsletter on WordPress or Ghost, given that we already have a website and are building separate tools — a public harm database, harm maps, and a gig worker registry — that will eventually live on the same domain

-What the technical architecture should look like so a non-technical journalist can independently publish stories and send newsletters without ongoing developer help

-What skills and experience we should require when posting a Multi-Week Project to find a volunteer developer to do the actual build.

Design questions:
-We have existing brand colors, typography, and a logo but no designer on the team. We need guidance on how to translate our existing brand into a newsroom and newsletter design that looks professional and credible

-Which newsletter design approach to recommend — a custom-designed template vs an out-of-the-box theme we adapt — given our limited capacity

-What a realistic design process looks like for a small nonprofit team: should we find a separate designer volunteer or can the developer handle both?

Our constraints: We have limited technical and design capacity. No one on our current team can own the design or build process day-to-day. We need a system and a web design that is easy to maintain independently once it is set up, looks professional, and can scale as our evidence base and readership grows. Our goal is to walk away from this session with a clear platform recommendation, a design direction, and a precise brief to post for our Multi-Week Project volunteer.