I am looking for a specific news portal CMS. I know all the major "general" CMS (like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla) and even the less known ones (like TYPO3, Expression Engine, Text Pattern or Concrete5). I'm already working with a Drupal distribution called OpenPublish and another WordPress installation to determine which would be better, but these are more of a Plan B. I would like to work directly with a CMS that was build exactly for this kind of tasks specific to a news / media portal. It doesn't matter if the CMS is commercial (however, I don't want to pay a monthly fee) or free, but I need to be able to use it on my own server / hosting and I need to be able to access it's source code (not to modify it, but to integrate it with future plugins / modules). If you know any CMS that qualifies for this job, please let me know. In the last few days I was all over Google but I couldn't anything worth mentioning.
Joomla is good. If you are after a news site, you may consider Snews - can't get simpler than that and it is quite powerful if you think a bit before building. There are many examples at their site and the fact that you can use it on basically any template makes it the more brilliant to use. CuteNews - another quite powerful news cms with many many good addons. An example is http://www.theurbantwist.com/ Cutenews.ru - based on CuteNews but not as restrictive and with pretty nice addons as well. An example is the site http://www.nepalmountainnews.com/ Basically, the above are better than Joomla's News/Magazine Component (i've been stalking that site for so long and while development has been good there are still features missing - Look at their forum for more info - good front-end, back-end still needs work.) Good luck with your site.
Depends on personal skills. I would say that WordPress is the easiest one and probably easily can handle high traffic. Joomla project would look more professional, but Joomla may have problem handling large number of simultaneous connections and probably you will need more expensive hosting. Drupal is somewhere between Joomla and WordPress.
DLE's (DataLife Engine) main niche is news sites, so you may use this for comparing to other products as well (P.S.: it's commercial, but has Demo variant, just it uses Win-1251; full version +UTF-8).