I've already written such a news log (also called weblog) script myself now.
Yesss...

I used forumdisplay.php and showthread.php as a starting point, a lot of copy and paste (really a lot), some new templates etc. and it's already working - including support for vB code, similies etc.. I had some problems calling the script from within the front page (index.html) of the web site instead of inside the vB folder but I could fix that (there were slight changes to global.php necessary).

I noticed also that I had no clear idea how to show the 'first few lines' since the line number depends on the HTML formatting. Counting sentences or words wasn't a good idea either because some news writers here wanted to determine the size of the intro text by themselves. So I added support for a tag '{RM}' which tells my script to stop printing the text and instead it creates a link pointing to the article (i.e. to the top of the thread). The text for this link just reads 'Read more...' + a 'Commments(n)' link where n is the number of replies to the news article.
The news writer has to insert such a {RM} tag himself in the article which is ok for me.

If somebody is interested I would release the script after some cleanup. I'm a PHP beginner so it's not very clean yet - it's more or less copy&paste from the vB scripts. So there is a lot of redundant stuff in there etc.. It might also be that it works only with PHP4 for some reasons.

BTW, I'm glad that I bought the vB and not one of those unreadable Perl based forum systems because after 4 days playing around with PHP I think PHP is pretty cool. You can start progamming within one day if you know some C.