Followup from about two weeks later:
I got the live news feed to work. A couple of things I found out:
1. The browser was blocking the RSS feed from the news source. In Firefox, I right clicked on the "Shield" on the LHS of the URL line, and the news feed popped up! You have to put instructions about how to disable browser blocking for your site visitors, or most of them won't ever see your news! Not sure what the security implications of this are, though...
2. The RSS 2 HTML site (rss.bloople.net) works really well to convert a news source website into a script that can be placed into a code block in the sidebar (as so well explained by neeklamy above). It's very straightforward and easy to use! However, it doesn't seem to work on every RSS newsfeed that I tried it on, so you might have to try another newsfeed, or dig more deeply into why some URLs result in good code scripts, and others don't.
3. If you get a code script to work, it usually "populates" your webpage with the news feed rather quickly (you don't have to wait several minutes as the script queries the news site).
I'm still trying to figure out how to get a different news feed on the different blog pages on my site, but that seems to be in the coding for my template, so I think I' stuck with one newsfeed for all of the blogs.
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