One Installation Multiple Pseudo-Blogs

I am administrating the website for a small non-profit. WP is being used as a CMS and the site contains a number of static pages for the organization.

I would like to set up blogging in the site. The organization runs multiple locations in the local area and I would like to set things up so that the staff at each location could have their own pseudo-blog. I say pseudo-blog, because I realize that with one WP install they will all be technically posting to the same blog. However, I would like to separate things out so that people from the outside can go to something like https://www.myorg.com/blog/alphaville & https://www.myorg.com/blog/betatown and see different contents (with similar functionality for feeds).

I am assuming that this is best accomplished through using tags or categories, but I have two questions:

1.) tags vs. categories, which one is better for what I describe above and are their other advantages / disadvantages to each?

2.) according to the support pages, the urls would look something like:
https://example.wordpress.com/category/food/
https://example.wordpress.com/tag/rice/
is there any alternative to this? The address doesn’t have to be exactly as above, but I’d prefer to avoid “tag” or “category” because they sound more technical and because the site is oriented to non-English speakers.