I am not at all familiar with moderators on WP! These are non-standard roles. The permissions system is incredibly crude though and it is not possible for a user to have more than one role, unless there is a plugin for this.

I would think what you would have to do is get the user to create another account set as Contributor or Author, which will allow them to manage their own posts.

I tend not to sweat these things too much because I run daily backups. If a user messes up, it can always be fixed. I just make people Editors and rely on version history and data backups. As I am unfamiliar with the non-standard roles you have, I have no clue what the person may lose the ability to do, if you switched them to a regular Editor. These people will see a part of the Admin dashboard but not all.

I understood that.

I Googled your question later and it looks like there are possible plugins that may be able to get you a result. I see a convoluted and unsupported free plugin and a paid plugin. The paid one is much nicer but one would expect that. There are bound to be more, if I found these so easily.

""news" page on the home page" <- That's two or more pages. My suspicion is you are blogging posts to the homepage and therefore there would be multiple posts, with new ones being created all the time.

To be honest, if I was running that site, I would either make him an editor on trust or post his emails. Both are much less hassle than messing around with plugins, their compatibility, their updating, etc., etc. I might consider making him the author of the page and setting him as a Publisher (can edit own posts).

Why? There is more likelihood of something going wrong adding plugins to alter the way WP works, considering the plugins you already have existing (and time) than there is making him a Publisher or Editor. As I said, anything messed up is recoverable and it doesn't break your whole site. You want zero risk? Keep taking the emails.

You know? It really is not so bad updating a site from someone else's content, unless they provide it in a poor format. When you balance it out, it is a heck of a lot less work than keeping WP all up to date and bug free.

There is another way you could look at this. You could blog SimplePress posts to the homepage, either from a dedicated private forum, by selection or something else. I'm sure you would find a plugin that did that. Your permissions would then be forum based.

I see mostly static content. I don't see any news other than one from 2010, which appears orphaned. I really see little risk in making this guy either a Publisher or Editor.

Taking time and going in circles is normal for WordPress - at least it seems that way to me!

http://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/

"eMember" is non-standard and I have no clue what it is. It must relate to one of your plugins or a manual configuration.