I want to start a news blog in Wordpress covering a specific niche, how do I get the content from other news websites to feed into my Wordpress site to populate it with content? Is there a plugin that will implement this?
As others have already suggested, there are plugins to help implement this. However, you have to be careful. It's content scraping, and that's against Google's Webmaster TOS. Make sure your blog hosts a heck of lot more original content than scraped material.
or make your scraped content original, obviously. btw, I'd be interested to see a link to the place where google says content scraping is against their TOS.
Wp Robot is the best software, however, if you only want to scrape "feeds" then wp-o-matic is enough because it is free. But if you want a software that can spin a bit, mixing the content from youtube, etc, then wprobot is the best so far.
At official website WordPress.org you can find a lot of useful plug-ins and choose the best the best one for your website.
By scraping content from other blogs you are diluting the 'unique content' factor and you really need to have a lot of your own content, not just copying from other sources. Google does not like duplicate content and it will affect your rankings. Chow chow, Kevin