[SOLVED] Grouping nodes

Hi. I posted a problem I was having to the forums at http://drupal.org/node/461694 and was advised to post here. I think I can probably describe the problem more clearly here than I did there:

I'm running a site that posts several news briefs (where a news brief is a content type) every Wednesday. I'd like to find a way to do the following things:

1) have a view that displays all of the news briefs for a given Wednesday together on a single page, without having to create a new view each week;
2) display the titles of all of the news briefs for the past few weeks in the right sidebar, grouped by the week they were published with a heading for each week, and with each title linking to the relevant view described in 1), and also skipping down the page to the appropriate brief;
3) enter all of the news briefs for the week one at a time, but publish them simultaneously.

There will be less technically literate people editing the site, so the more that can be done behind the scenes, the better. For example, the views described in 1) will have to have some <a name="foo"> tags, but I'd like the users not to have to write those themselves.

Can someone give me an idea of the best way to do this using Drupal? I posted here because I assume it will involve Views. I also looked into the 'nodequeue' module, because I thought it might help, but on closer inspection, it doesn't look like it would solve this problem.

If this is the wrong place to pose the question, or if there's documentation that can help answer the question, please point me in the right direction.

Thanks,
Macho