Data architecture question

This is not a specific PHP question, but more a data architecture query. However I guess several of you have considered this more than once. In developing a news site with many articles on it, what is best practise for storing and administering the content? A specific problem I have been examining is that each database field can store only a finite number of characters. If the body of an article is larger than this, what is the best approach for storage? One solution might be to save the content in a text file with a unique filename on the hd - but this must lead to slow queries as the data is external to the db. What about specifying formatting of the content? Is the best approach to place formatting tags in the copy which are interrupted on the fly? How about images associated with the copy, should these be saved to unique filename on hd, or is there a better approach? Thanks for your help, Ashley