You need to create a new folder somewhere, assign the news  profile to it
so that it can store news items, then point the news web  part on that
dashboard to the new folder.

You point it by editing the web part  (Content->web part name-> advanced
settings, bottom "Store the following...") to have the location.

By default, the web part has "PORTAL_NEWS_FOLDER_PATH_HOLDER" as the
first entry. change this to your folder.

For example, if you created  your folder in /Portal
Content/Resources/CustomQuickLinks/IT then that's what you put for the
top line. The second line is for order and the 3rd is for how many to
display.

For order, I typically use "DAV:displayname" ASC so that I can simply
name the items 1-topitem, 2-doclib, 3-images etc so they show up in my
preferred order instead of most recently made.

btw, this has been answered several times both in this newsgroup and on
microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.