SharePoint News publishing

Great to hear.  One thing that would be really great is a news rollup ability.  I'd like individual teams/departments to be able to post news to their own pages, but when an important news item occurs, mark it some way to be included on the home page news feed for the entire organization or location.  So as an example, HR has a team page and posts news that users can browse and look when they desire.  But when a major benefit change occurs, they could mark the news item somehow and it would post both on the HR page, and on the main intranet home page.  

Now that I think about it some more, if you focused on being able to post the news items to Yammer, I'd just keep the Yammer feed on the home page, and then just tell the departments to only share the important news items to Yammer.  

If you don't have conversations on the news items themselves, I think it would be good to have a way for viewers to easily ask a question about the news.  So if they open the news item, have a button that could email the creator or associated Group.