When cron runs cron.daily it runs a shell script
/etc/cron.daily/inn-cron-expire which does an su to news who
then runs /usr/bin/news.daily.  That script tries to write
to the file /var/lib/new/.news.daily, but fails because it
doesn't have permission.  The entire /var/lib/news directory
is owned by news and every file inside of it is owned by
news except .news.daily.  I was thinking that there was
probably a part of the installation code that did a chown
news:news on /var/lib/news/* which wouldn't affect files
that begin with a .