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Idle news items should be collected together in one place and released both in an IDLE section of each Misc/NEWS and in each idlelib/NEWS.txt. Once a decision is made where to collect them originally, a script should be written to make appropriate copies. If someone volunteers, scattered entries in current Misc/NEWS could be collected together.

I think it would be better to keep everything in an IDLE section in Misc/NEWS, and have something/someone extract the section(s) before the release. In Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt we probably don't need to have separate sections for alphas/betas/rcs like we do in Misc/NEWS.

This is related to #17221. I agree that news items need to be consolidated in both Misc/NEWS and Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt.

Setting #17221 as a dependency. Once that is fixed it would be good to keep IDLE entries in Misc/NEWS, and copy them in Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt before the release.

I put 1 or 2 items in idlelib/NEWS, but it does not really matter which way they go. I guess the greater separation in Misc/NEWS says they should go there first, as moving to idlelib would delete reliease info. I will move the one item over sometime, maybe after the big patch.

New changeset aa059a8fb55a by Terry Jan Reedy in branch '2.7':
Issue #17506: Synchronize Misc/NEWS and idlelib/NEWS.txt for 2.7.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/aa059a8fb55a 

The items in Misc/NEWS and idlelib/NEWS.text were mostly disjoint.

To minimize news merge headaches, I have been pushing news items separately from IDLE patches, usually in batches of at least two. It has not been too much bother to copy from NEWS.txt to NEWS.
If and when news handling is automated, I will request that items directed at the IDLE section also go to NEWS.txt.

Separate news items are now consolidated during the release process. But two issue with copying them. 1. They are not line wrapped, whereas news.txt is. 2. I don't always make (or keep) entries identical.

A suggestion: rather than trying to maintain a separate IDLE news file ("don't repeat yourself), it might be much easier to link to the IDLE section in each releases's formatted CHANGELOG now included in Python 3 docsets. For example:
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/changelog.html#idle
or
https://docs.python.org/3.8/whatsnew/changelog.html#idle
Yes, users would have to scroll down to each release's IDLE section but I suspect that wouldn't be a huge burden considering how infrequently change files are consulted. To be even more useful, IDLE could first attempt to find the changelog in the Python installer's bundled copy of the docset like the F1 key does. For example, with the macOS installer, the corresponding file URL is:
file:///Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/Resources/English.lproj/Documentation/whatsnew/changelog.html#idle