Someone earlier made the point that they're probably just trying to keep out non-news items from their aggrigator. I think that's probably the case.

Sure, it's not a perfect system;...

hm...okay.  Last question for now:

If I do end up just duplicating the code, is there a better way to do the second query than this?

 SELECT * FROM 

  (SELECT *,...

That sounds good, but what about the where clause that may or may not be there?  Do I need to duplicate my code within an IF statement, or is there...