Thanks for the advice. I've poked around mod_proxy but not sure where to drop those directives. I can lynx to localhost:8080 fine on the server (i.e. the site works locally on the server), so I guess I'm looking for a map from example.com/news -> localhost:8080, which at least seems like progress. Do I need to put some handler in .htaccess, or is that way off base? Ideas?
I don't think .htaccess will help you at all; example.com/news exists in "URL-space" not in the filesystem. So you don't need to do anything with a /news directory.