base.ox4.org

There's a great step-by-step method on the fbloggs site on how to create use Drupal to create news items, display the latest stories in a block (which can be put in, for example, a block on your site), a page with the most recent news, and an archive of news. It's also quite a good introduction on how to create new content types and use the views module.
 
UPDATE: I've added some files that you can download and import to add news stories to your site. They're based on this step by step blog, but have some extra bits (e.g. RSS news feed). They're in the files section here.

There's a preview of the news block & page on www.fbloggs.com/drupal/.
 
Here's fblogg's how to create news (the whole article goes over two blogs).
 
There's a bit of an error on the second blog which led somebody to ask "I only have one question, when I try and create the page to hold the most recent items, I’m warned that there is no path for this page and I subsequently don’t have any news items previewed even though I have created them" - don't worry about the error, just carry on and it will work.
 
Personally, I preferred having the date below the headline, and to have pagination on the news page - these can both be set using the views module. And, if you need to, you could add a new taxonomy to categorise your news. I'll leave you to play around with the settings to find out how.