You can just make a new "news-portal" which instantiates a second XoWIKI instance in the community, wouldn't that help? Like dotlrn-xowiki-news or something in that line.
I am just concerned you are going to put a lot of effort into something which could be solved with less effort differently.
Changing the datamodell is not the hard part, getting the multi language bit right seems to be more of an issue for me at least. And with XoWIKI you also get "Teaser" support, which allows you to display a different text on the summary page then is on the actual full page (instead of the 50 first characters or whatever you have configured).
