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That's helpful. And Dmitril deserves props -- asked the question while on a call and really didn't think it through. Thanks.

My pleasure!  We're all in this together Good luck!

If I understand correctly, you're ranking well for a page and related keywords but you'll be adding new "news" content related to the title page topic. Sounds good to me. I'd make sure to note my changefreq in the sitemap to hourly or daily. While I'd expect you to continue to rank well for your static content, there are other factors to consider in a "redesigned" page. For example, how your new HTML code is structured; the order of content displayed to search engines (source code); how much of the original content you keep above the fold; relevance of your news to your current keyword(s); the number and quality of links added to this page; change in the amount of traffic to this page; and of course all the other technical and editorial SEO factors. Only thought about this for a few minutes but I'll post back if I think of anything else. I'm a little confused about the redirect you want to implement. Are you unable to just replace the original page or use the original page URL? Note that permanent redirects tend not to pass 100% of your link juice http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection. Try to do that, but if you can't then the redirect is likely your best option.

Thanks Alex. Super helpful.

First off make sure that you are using htaccess to redirect to either www or without www.  Be aware that EVERYTIME you update Drupal core that you may override this file and it revert back to the default file.  I make this mistake often. If you want to share your site I can take a look other than that the canonical should take care of the rest.

Thanks this is really helpful. What tweaked me on this was the weekly SEO Moz crawls of my campaigns that were reporting back "missing meta description" with a giant red "error" button.