Thanks for the comments!
It's true, the images do look a little washed out. We printed on B&W newsprint and lightened images significantly because we've had problems with images printing too dark on past projects. We weren't able to look at print proofs, because our printer was in another city. I think maybe the problem is that we should have upped the contrast for higher impact? Any advice you have, GarryP, would certainly be appreciated!
a.l.e Yes, definitely! I only discovered the baseline grid two days ago, wish I'd known about it earlier. For one or two articles, we adjusted line spacing to take up some whitespace, which looks odd and is a terrible hack, but we weren't skilled/creative enough to use other ways to address that problem.
Will investigate on the wiki what needs work, and whether I can contribute in that way! As it happens, I am a programmer.