Dare I suggest that if you're only looking for something to run the news part of your site then it may be worth taking a look at a different CMS package.
eZ Publish is a bit of an overkill just for news and as you've probably worked out already, with the lack of replies to your post, eZ publish doesn't have a big enough community to answer the various problems that you're likely to face along the way.
My site uses Mambo for news, which is very quick an easy, although in hindsight I think that Xoops or Drupal would have been a better choice.
There also many other OS packages that could fit the bill, from Midgard and WebEditor to the various news apps that can be found on Hotscripts.com