Would you believe I just discovered that there is a news module in Indico?  It's hidden in the admin menu, but you can seemingly use it to post news items on the site.  Now if I only had some real news to post...

That said, it's pretty rudimentary.  News is global, not associated with any specific conference, and there is no RSS feed.  Probably not what we need in the end.  But it has a fancy HTML editor.