Thomas-
What changes will be necessary in MediaWiki for running news with it? We'd need some kind of channels (like categories but with preview/summary).
My current mid term approach is to add a syntax for showing the last n newly created articles in a category by date, so that category tagging becomes equivalent to publishing. This has some problems in cases where an article is updated, or the creation date is not the date you want to use. My long term approach is to use [[m:Wikiflow]] to set a publication date property (possibly a Wikidata structural element of the news article namespace) once an article has passed through the workflow process, and to use that for sorting.
Regards,
Erik