Looking for input on publishing media standards

[Avanarius]

I work for a non-profit organization and we frequently require multiple sources of materials to be published to the media such as: news paper articles (all different sizes) flyers, press releases etc.

Because we also have an internship program which develops these materials to be published I often find the interns are not following any given standard because we don't have a standard in place. Today I received 3 articles to be published; 1 was a .pdf, another was a .doc and the last one was .png.

What I'm wondering is: If you were a publisher, which of the following available formats (at a given resolution) would you prefer to work with overall? Is there standard already set for these kinds of practices?

The programs we have available to us are:

Publisher 2007 (.pub)
Word 2007 (.doc / .docx)
Photoshop Elements 7 (.psd / and image files .jpg .png .tiff etc)
Paint.net (same as above minus .psd)

Other formats I've seen are: .pdf which we don't have a program readily available to edit them.

[Mafai]

PDFs for everything.

You can generate a PDF out of any of those programs.

That's where doPDF steps in. It's one of a number of programs that installs a virtual printer on your machine. Now when you go to print a web page, word document, photo or pretty much anything else, you can save it as a PDF file. You can set the resolution to anything from 72 dpi to 2400 dpi, and the "printed" files are text searchable.

A program like this adds a PDF option to your printer dropdown in all these programs.