Launchd actually runs newsyslog every hour, on the hour. It is because of the default configuration in /etc/newsyslog.conf and a quirk in newsyslog (it will not run a skipped event more than one hour after it was originally scheduled) that the default setup only rotates system.log within an hour of midnight.

It will work to rotate system.log by size, but Unix systems traditionally rotate system.log daily to make the search for error messages simpler.

Finally, newsyslog.conf cannot be used to rotate the other files that eventually grow unwieldy, like daily.out, weekly.out, the apache2 logs, and even fsck_hfs.log. Instead, try a script like

#!/bin/sh
# script to rotate logs

rotatelog ()
{
    log=$1
    size=`ls -l $log | awk '{print $5}'`
    if [ $size -gt 50000 ] 
    then
        bzip2 < $log > $log.0.bz2 
        chmod 0644 $log.0.bz2
        > $log
    fi
}

newlog ()
{
    log=$1
    [ -f $log.2.bz2 ] && mv $log.2.bz2 $log.3.bz2
    [ -f $log.1.bz2 ] && mv $log.1.bz2 $log.2.bz2
    [ -f $log.0.bz2 ] && mv $log.0.bz2 $log.1.bz2
    bzip2 < $log > $log.0.bz2 
    chmod 0644 $log.0.bz2
    > $log
}


cd /var/log
rotatelog daily.out
rotatelog weekly.out

cd /var/log/apache2
newlog access_log
newlog error_log

as /etc/weekly.local or /etc/monthly.local.

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