Pilgrim,
I am not an expert on IIP. I am building a site now that utilizes it, but am currently concentrating on building the forum structure. I have taken a good look at the config panel.
As I understand it, the amount of news articles is not limited to 4 articles. You identify a maximum of 4 forums for the news posts to pull from. You also identify how many articles from each forum are to be pulled. So in reality you could end up with plenty of posted articles.
The thing to keep in mind is if you want to control what gets posted as news you need to control the access to the forums that the news is pulled from. You could make these "read only" forums so that you could control the posts in them.
For example in IIP config you could pick 4 forums and go 5 deep in each forum and end up with 20 posted articles.
Hope this helped...
