This might be nice (especially if the section is going to stick around anyway), but I don't think it's a pressing need: major news items tend to get posted in Meditations anyway.

On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to track minor news items... so after due reflection, aquacade++. Though we can always just go direct to http://use.perl.org, if we really want to.

And I think the answer to your original question is further down in one of the threads kudra linked--take a little harder look. :-) My guess is that the format changed when http://news.perl.org got morphed into http://use.perl.org, and reeducating perlnewsbot to parse it seemed unworthy of the effort.

Update: to clarify, I would favor collecting all news items (major and minor) in the relevant section: I mentioned the minor items because they currently have no place on this site at all, not merely no place of their own.