Best way to go about my news menu item Drupal newb here.  

I'm trying to rebuild an existing site into the drupal architecture.
For the sake of context, it is a site for a non-profit organisation that wants to make insights in a certain field of scientific research accessible to the general public. 
Because the organisation is not large I would like to keep the current structure of the site. Now, my first problem is with creation of a menu item for news item. Clicking on that item is supposed to display news items. That's all I want for now. 

What I've been trying to figure out reading pfds, surfing the web, watching videos about menu creation and taxonomy et.. for a little more than a DAY now, what is the best way plant this in Drupal (7.7 by the way)?

1. 
 - Create content type called "news item"
 - Create a node using the basic page content type and give as title "News" enter "Latest    news" in the body field
 - Go to admin>structure > Menu and create a menu item and assign
   as path www.domain/news/news item 
 - Each time a news item would be created, the author could then choose "News" as parent menu item.

This approach is obviously ignoring taxonomy. But how does one apply taxonomy to this anyway? As I understand, you can't create a vocabulary and then assign a menu item to that vocabulary name itself, simply because there doesn't seem to be a node that represents a vocabulary name. Correct me if I'm wrong(I kind of hope I'm wrong here).

Of course, You could create a vocabulary called "News" but and then one level below          "News" would have to be something like types of news as terms and then use those terms as nodes that I can assign menu items to. The problem is the types of news would be already too granular for the site that I want to rebuild with Drupal. I just want to have a content type newsitems to be children of of a menu item in my main menu called "news". 

2. Just create a "content" taxonomy and have terms like News, and About, media, bios as terms (and thus menu items) and branch off from there. 

This approach also seems besides the point of what taxonomy is trying to accomplish. The uberparent of any vocabulary is "content" for each and every site on the web anyway and doesn't describe anything at all, so what would be the use making a vocabulary out of it then? But then again, does it have to describe anything just as long is works and would it be a relatively decent "creative" solution?
Ok, I kind of found my way through it eventually. Still pretty amazing the amount of possibilities. Makes me dizzy.