I want to include a block with standard footer stuff into the bottom of some of my news items.  But nothing happens when I include:

{block="my_footer"}

Is there a way to do this?

You can’t use template code in articles, since they aren’t templates and won’t be parsed as such. 

You would have to add that block call to the article record template. If you only need it for some articles, you would create a custom field so you easily turn this output on per article. 

If you don’t want to edit the template, you could also directly add the block content to a custom field output. That way, you could control it all through the field and could place the content above or below the main article content.