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.