I was hesitant at first to use the Blog feature for news releases, but as the Bard said, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." You can see an example of how the blog looks when used as a news feed here (we don't have images, but you can imagine them in there. The Blog module exposes an RSS feed, which you can consume on other pages or with the Feed Manager feature.

As Joe said, there are still some improvements that would make the blog better when showing news, but it's definitely a workable solution now, and the compromises are fairly minor to me. Joe, when you are able to put those changes in, maybe the module name should be changed to "Blog & News" too.

Jamie