Are you using dotlrn (which has a dotlrn portlet named news-portlet) or plain OpenACS?
Do you want to get the output of an existing OpenACS news instance into xowiki, or do you just want to get "news-functionality" into xowiki? In the latter case, there is e.g. http://alice.wu-wien.ac.at:8000/xowiki/news an option, which is based on form-pages and do not require an additional package.
The news-portlet page in xowiki just summarizes some statistics about the dotlrn-news package, xowiki just displays the summary information similar other packages like e.g. https://openacs.org/xowiki/chat
