Jennifer-
the article is
Waights, V., 1995. Captive maintenance of adults and juveniles of the genus Triturus during the terrestrial phase. Alytes 13(2): 77-80.
If you can't get hold of it easily, email me, and I might be able to send you a scan.
The moss I use is the stuff that grows on damp lawns- you can pull up big lumps if you find a good spot. It might be live when it's pulled up, but it still holds water well enough when it's dead.
On the subject of aquatic setups, I use bare tanks with lots of elodea/egeria, which floats near enough the surface to let the newts put their heads above water. When it comes to clean them out, I just take the newts out, tip the whole lot into a net, rinse with water, put clean water in the tank, and tip it all back in.
The Greater Manchester Great Crested Newt Group did some work on raising T. cristatus for repopulating ponds- they decided that releasing yearlings gave the best results, and devised a system for raising them as rapidly as possible. As I remember, they used bare tanks (no weeds), around 15cm water, with a floating two-tiered polystyrene island (they thought that a roof on the island better maintained humidity). They fed almost constantly with earthworms, and managed to grow some newts to a size of 15cm in a year.