How do you configure it so a published article promoted to another page instead of "front page"? I have a main menu with:

"Home" -basic page 
 "Contact us" -the default drupal contact form
 "news" - which I want all the news articles to dynamically publish to the top so that when people click on news they see the latest article. 

I thought that making a menu item in the form of an "article page" might do it but that only seemed to be comfortable with a single article. I made it into a book and it has allowed me to create a page but the formatting has gone dead weird so I would like to be able to create my articles and click an option which allows me to promote my articles to the news page. Is this possible? 

Thanks
With Views, you can use "promoted to front page" as a filter value, so that things with that box checked can also be "promoted" to any page view that takes that as a filter.

If you don't want to us the native "promoted to front page" checkbox, but would rather have a separate checkbox just for that page, you can add a custom field to your content type(s) and use that as a filter value instead.