2
Ok, I figured this out - I'll summarize my solution in case someone else tries to do the same thing.
I had already made all my content public and turned off the login block
using this FAQ article. Its important to give anonymous users access to the modules, such as news, that you want everyone to see.
Issue 1: In modules/news/xoops_version.php I just commented the lines
$modversion['sub'][1]['name'] = _MI_NEWS_SMNAME1;
$modversion['sub'][1]['url'] = "submit.php";
For Issue 2 I went to modules/news/index.php and commented out a lot of the "$morelink" variable builds. I started commenting under the line
$ccount = $sarray[$i]->comments();
which included a couple of $morelink assignments and the entire if/else block that followed.
Issue 3 was a bit tricky. First, you need to clone your templates and make sure they can be refreshed. See
FAQ: How do I build a theme? for steps to clone the templates - up through step 4 or so. Make sure to Set "update module template .html files from themes/your theme/templates directory?" to YES and select your templates in the preferences.
At that point, go to Admin, templates, then list the News templates from your new set of templates. You can edit news_item.html to take out the Posted By stuff.
The only problems will be when the news module gets upgraded, I'll probably have to go through most of this again. But it won't take as long next time