Multi-site or categories?

I’ve recently been redesigning a site for a college radio, switching from Drupal to WordPress from scratch. The site is based on the radio station, but each specialty show will also have its own blog. However, I want the layout to be the same from the main content to each blog. Categories more or less work, but things get tricky when I want information pages for the blogs, such as an ‘About’ and whatnot. Say I have a “Live” show. I’d want everything to be /live/page or /live/2011/06/post-title, but WordPress only wants to do posts, and I haven’t really found any solid permalink plugins. Should I stick to using categories? How can I improve the situation? Or is multisite a better option? Can I easily set things globally for multisites, like the layout and menu?

Thanks!

Categories are meta data for n:n relations: Each category can be related to multiple posts, and each post to multiple categories. So categories aren’t what you need.

I would set up a multi site installation. Use the main site for everything related to all sub sites and the subdomains or sub blogs for each section.

To force the same theme to all blogs, just delete the default theme (TwentyEleven, in 3.4 probably TwentyTwelve), install your custom theme and add the following line to the wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_DEFAULT_THEME', 'folder-name-of-your-custom-theme' );

Each new blog will now use this theme.