In fact, itnovosti.ru started from vnu.com idea to launch vnunet.com analog in Russia. So, after a quick view on vnunet structure, I decided to use Drupal as a core engine for publications part. As you can see, we take and copied vnunet.com design. Also, we uses paid Typepad account as separate "corporate" blog engine, and Movable Type as ru.gizmodo.com engine (ru.gizmodo now is the part of our resources), and for downloads we uses native vnunet engine with 3-d level domain mapping to itnovosti. We started from the scratch at November 2005 (first time I closely looked at Drupal in action) and in Feb 2006 we officially launched.
As to Drupal implemention details - no core modifications at all. Standart modules (blog + tinyMCE + aggregator) in active use + snippets to output content titles in sideblocks. Webtrends +google analytics to tracking visitors and doubleclick for banner rotation. So simple, isn't it? :-)
A few words for newbies: let me put my penny into answer for question "Can Drupal...", "Is Drupal suited to..." etc.
Totally answer - yes. For most of modern content-based web-projects, Drupal ready to go out of box. You can setup site in the half of hour and start to producing your perfect content and RSS feeds for technoraty :-) But you definitly need to be prepared to:
1. Design implementation (surprise, hah?)