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I'd agree with Kris that number/divirsity of linking domains might be what's holding you back.

As far as re-energizing your link building, you might try this approach:

1. Block off a couple days on your calendar for "Epic Link Discovery Days"

2. Stock up on sugary candy and create a high-energy playlist  (>100bpm)

3. Create an spreadsheet (I call mine my "Link Building Briefcase") with separate worksheets for each category of potential link sources, for example:

• Sites/Domains you control
• Partner sites
• Associations & Charities you support
• Relevant 3rd-party sites who could link to a resource on your site
• Social Network Profiles (do-follow)
• Q/A sites with do-follow profile and answer links
• Blog and Forum Commenting
• Human-edited sites that repost blog articles
• Article Submission Sites (relevant, do follow)
• Press Release Sites
• Industry/Vendor Directories
• General Directories (free and paid)

4. When your allocated days arrive, do some warmup exercieses, put on your headphones, break out the candy and use the following tools to rapidly discover potential link sources, pasting links to the pages and sites in your spreadsheet as you go:

• OpenSiteExplorer.org (focussing on links to competitor sites)
• OpenSiteExplorer.org (focussing on finding the most powerful pages on sites you can generate links from)
• SEOmoz Keyword difficulty tool (discover competitors for your keywords, and quickly see the top links that are helping them acheive their rankings)
• SEOmoz Labs Competitive Link Research Tools (input several competitors and find links they share, that you're missing).
• SEOmoz Juicy Link Finder (great way to quickly find some links you may have overlooked).
• SEOmoz's compiled list of top paid and free directories (find ones that are relevant to your industry).

Later, you can keep going back to your Link Building Briefcase and conquer each one-by-one.

Carpe Linkum!

I have a feeling that for most it's just a way to try and build credibility by showing 3rd-party endorsement.

I think there's a chance is does provide some amount of SEO benefit as far as increasing indexing frequency, as it may be the only section of the homepage that changes with regularity. That said, I think a blog (with a list of most recent posts on the homepage) serves this purpose better.

I think unless you're a large organization that get's a lot of 3rd-party media coverage, having a news section can be actually be a negative because:

• If most visitors are like me, they use the date of the last news post as a judgement of the site or company.
• Ongoing, it can be difficult to generate updates for the news section.
• Linking away from your homepage to another site = lost traffic and lost link juice (if you're into that).

My $0.02.