From what I have gathered they want a news slider with images, a place to list articles written by authors, picture gallery and rss feed parsing for automatically getting images and news items from various sources. As for the startup team skills they are not a startup and do not have technical expertise for building a site - I am helping them and because I am working in an IT department I don't have the time to build a site (I mean not in the timescale they would accept).

As for your recommendations I have checked wordpress, joomla and drupal and from what I have seen I felt like they need an immense amount of setup time to create a workable news site. There are themes which tout they provide this kind of functionality but I can't say "shucks, guys I don't know whether this will work but you have to pay this amount of dollars for an experiment".

Thanks for your comment by the way.