2
Jeremy
I see you've found how to clone blocks in another thread.
I suggest that you upgrade to the latest version of News (1.44?). In this version, the 'recent news' block comes with an option to filter by topic(s). So if you clone it, you can have as many topic-specific recent news blocks as you want. Same is true of the 'recent post' block in NewBB2 (which has easy cloning, see the readme file), and we managed to hack the 'recent downloads' block of WF-downloads as well.
We are combining these with multiple instances of a duplicatable content module (Tiny-D) to create topic-specific 'sub-portals' for our work site.