And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your text. If not today then in a year.
Sometimes people look for old news, but our category system in Wikinews is not too good (alphabetical). Bugzilla knows this problem for years.
But - click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:Random
and next use http://stats.grok.se/
Articles in en Wikinews are more popular, than articles in smaller Wikipedias
przykuta