The XML feed (http://www.its.ndsu.edu/help_desk/outages/file.rss) was not creating links directly to the single news items.  Since a singlePid on the feed appears to be domain-wide, I opted to insert a single news display element on the outage page itself, with a side-effect of "no news_id given" being displayed to regular users.

As a solution, I modified the pi/class.tx_ttnews.php file at line 573 to

$content = "<span class=\"no_news_id\">$noNewsIdMsg</span>";

so that I could use CSS to hide the words.  This, of course, is site-wide, but since I know how to work with tt_news now, this is not a problem for me.  Other users, however, should be aware that this message is only visible if css is disabled or by looking in the HTML source.  If you don't know how to work with tt_news, contact me (Jill) with questions before inserting any tt_news records.