Hi,
We have it on the road map to make improvements to the blog to make it better suited for news type scenarios.
However, what most people do currently is use the Blog in conjunction with the Feed Manager. So for example you create a page named "news" and put a blog on it, make a few posts. Then you copy the feed url from the blog feed icon link, then you put an instance of Feed Manager on the home page and name it "Recent News", you consume the blog feed in feed manager and you set it to show excerpts, and to only include the 5 most recent items from the blog feed. The feed manager also already supports a scrolling of the feed, you can enable it in the settings for Feed Manager. When users click the links in the feed manager it goes to the detail in the blog.
Hope that helps,
Joe