You can also use categories as News, Projects etc. and use category archive page as the archive for them. But this will limit the functionality as you can not easily categorize the posts within that category. So I recommend using cusom post type for that.
If you decide to go with custom post type then you’ll need to set the has_archive parameter to true While registering post_type, That will enable archive page for that post type, It uses $post_type as slug for archive page for that custom post type, then archive page url will be
mysite.com/post_type/