Thanks for the help Lynne. I ended up giving up and using your original code for the full news posts. Originally I thought it was just going to post a copy of the news post in the first page of the comments, but now that I have seen it working I see it just draws directly from the CMS, which is better in any case!

I was afraid I would have to maintain the preview post if I had to update it, so I wanted to keep it short, but it turns out I was trying something unnecessary.
Anyways, thanks again for trying to help. You're an awesome admin for vb.org