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As EGOL suggests, if the pages haven't received any traffic in the past year or so, then they most likely are dead weight and  you need to get rid of them. I would, however, do two things: Review all the links to your website and 301 redirect any news articles or URLs that have links pointing to them. You'll want to make sure that you keep any links that you have pointing to those pages. Rather than use a 404 error on those pages when you remove them, I would use a '410 gone' error to indicate to Google that they're no longer present, have been removed, and they need to remove them from their index.

Is this sneaky or not?    It's dumb... and kinda sneaky. Dumb, because they would have been smarter to point the links to their main website, instead of using an intermediate website. It's dumb because they waste money on domain registration and hosting. It's dumb because there is a loss of power in the redirect. It's dumb because Google doesn't like links on press release sites or any kind of site where you pay for a page that has pagerank-passing links on it. So, its dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.. and kinda sneaky.