How to learn editing/newsroom best practices?

I love your thinking and I really wish I could lend some current knowledge, but my newsroom know-how is much too dated for you at this point. As far as philosophies and ethics, though, I would point you to the http://www.cjr.org/ and http://www.onthemedia.org/ as groups giving sophisticated thought to your industry. They are worth putting into your regular weekly scan routines. I can't suggest anyone personally, but I think you would get excellent advice from people who edit arts/culture weeklies. Most major cities have one or more. They may offer good insights into your structural needs because they're generally fairly small shops, depend a lot on routines and systems, use a ton of freelancers, and have to make it all work fiscally to survive. I suspect a friendly call or email to editors of organizations like that in your area would pay off. Offer to take them for lunch or a beer. The editors of these papers form a nice community themselves and I think you'd be able to find a few helpful people. To find some resources, maybe check out the http://www.iswne.org/, the http://www.altweeklies.com/.

Honestly no idea if this is a best practice, but for the college feminist web magazine I manage (we run ~6 new posts a week and have around ~15 [part time/volunteer staff]) our editorial calendar is a two tab google spreadsheet. On one tab we have all "in-progress" pieces, with column's for a piece's working title, author, editor, deadline, status, etc. to keep track off all pieces that are being worked out. The other tab is our posting schedule, which I fill out with a co-managing editor every week, where we lay which piece will be published on each day, who's responsible for copy-editing/scheduling, etc. In terms of our general process, we use http://www.submittable.com/ to receive/accept submissions. Then, we a couple staff members who are responsible for doing first reads of pieces, rejecting those that are not workable, and then bringing the rest to a weekly editorial meeting where editors can claim pieces to work with an author on. Editors/contributors usually go through 2-3 rounds of edits (either through Google docs or tracked changes in Word), our art team finds an appropriate image(s), and then editors upload the piece to our CMS where I or my co-managing editor copy-edits, makes sure the piece is ready for publication, and schedules it. Hope this is somewhat helpful -- feel free to reach out to me with any questions. I'll be watching this thread to see what other advice folks have!

Read Poynter and Romanesko. Poynter often offers online classes on journalism ethics and skills. But keep in mind that each publication will have its own version of best practices (in the new media era these are not universal) and that certain types of pubs (newspapers, for example) will have a different set of standards than, say, trade publications.

Here's a cool http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2011/06/20/quick-update-to-the-docs-to-wordpress-plugin/ from the people at the Bangor (Maine) Daily News that eventually evolved http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2013/08/28/google-drive-to-wordpress-to-indesign-refined/ (watch the video!). I haven't used the plugin and the system (we're using Drupal), but I borrowed heavily from that while setting up a Google Docs + Google Sheets workflow and budgeting system (in case we ever get the resources to hire a developer to copy the BDN's system in Drupal to go full auto).

Oh man, thank you so much everyone for all this helpful info, it's really appreciated. The Poynter stuff in particular is exactly the kind of stuff I need, rehashes of "what everyone should know", even if it doesn't address the larger newsroom/new media questions as much, probably since that's all in such flux it seems. The Submittable suggestion is great too, I'm doing a demo now--I think this might fit in really well with a Trello calendaring/editing queue tracking system I'm trying to put together. Thanks y'all! Would love to hear anything more anyone has to say.