News Archive within a site - Detrimental?

[Entrusteddev]

I have a clients site, which we publish fresh news content daily and have done for some time. this has built up a huge archive of news over the past few years. All the news resides in a /news sub folder. The most interesting news articles are syndicated through facebook and twitter.

Note: All the news is original content.

The archive is based around a chronological filing system so /news/2010/December would retrieve news articles published in December 2010.

My first question is this, in the Post Panda seo world, since the news in the archives receives little to no traffic, will these be classed as low quality pages, even though they are generally informative and timely news articles?

My Second Question, It's my understanding that a site can be penalised for harbouring low quality pages, thus would I be better to do away with my news archive of around 600+ articles and impose a rule that news is removed from the site after a set period (say 6 -12 months)?

[EGOL]

We have a blog that publishes about six to ten short posts per day, each linking to an external URL that has great content.  Most of the content that we link to is newsy rather than evergreen.

Over time that content gets stale, the number of search queries drops and some of the links go dead.  This content loses its value over time.

Once each year we do a major purge of old posts, deleting a couple thousand at a time.

Before this purge is done we look at analytics to determine if any of the posts are pulling traffic from search.  When we find posts pulling lots of traffic we will create a new page of substantive content about that subject or identify an existing page that is relevant.  The posts are then  301 redirected to those pages.  All remaining posts are redirected to the homepage of the blog.

We have been doing this for a few years and it makes even more sense now that google seems to dislike pages with short  content.

[Entrusteddev]

Thats why I ask on SEOmoz, a sensible answer with sensible advice that can be easily put into action.

This had crossed my mind, however I've been staring at the woods so long, I couldn't see the trees!

Thanks EGOL.