32 megs of memory would be fine. Just give yourself 64 or 98 megs of swap if you feel nervous. As you speak of 4 gigs as it is one drive, prepare to die if you put swap on it. Something with a 500 meg or so root drive, and another drive for the news articles themselves. The second drive depends on how much news you want.
Drives are cheap, swap is cheap.
Linux doesn't use swap like old SunOs boxes that needed more swap then memory to actually even be capable of using it.