A news category can work great, but if you want to keep the news section separate from your main blog (homepage) it will require custom code to exclude it and it also leaves you with little room for customization.
I would personally recommend creating a custom post type. I made a free plugin that makes it easy to add custom post types to your site named Post Types Unlimited – so you can add a new custom post type for your site named “News”.
This will add a new dashboard in your WP admin where you can add your news posts separately from the standard blog posts.
By using a custom post type, the news posts will be automatically excluded from the homepage so they can be completely separate and you will have more control over them.
If you are using an SEO plugin (you should) such as Yoast SEO you may want your news articles to use a NewsArticle schema type and perhaps a different meta title structure. Having the news posts as a custom post type will make it a lot easier to manage the SEO settings separately from your standard articles.
If you decide to create the custom post type as I recommend, when adding your news post type one important thing to keep an eye out for is the “Has Archive” (has_archive) argument. When this setting/arg is set to true, WordPress will automatically create a page to display the posts but if it’s set to false you will need to create a standard page and add blocks/shortcodes to display the news posts. How you set that up really depends on your theme and how you want the news section to look.
Also, you may want to “categorize” your news articles. In which case I recommend adding a custom “News Category” taxonomy to your site. My plugin will also allow you to add custom taxonomies. This way you can categorize your news posts and again, keep them separate from the standard blog.